I'd echo a lot of what has been said about this by the folk who have
been making R work so well. One of the main difficulties is that the
environment of computations affects relative performance. e.g., what
settings did a distro package builder choose. I note that my 3 GHz Dual
Core machine running Ubuntu 8.04 gets
octave 3.0.0
octave:6> tic; a = a + 1; toc
Elapsed time is 0.120027 seconds.
octave:16> tic; for i=1:1e7; a(i) = a(i) + 1; end; toc;
Elapsed time is 238.311 seconds.
R2.8.1
> a <- rep(1,10000000)
> system.time(a <- a + 1)
user system elapsed
0.080 0.064 0.146
> system.time(for (i in 1:10000000) {a[i] <- a[i] + 1})
user system elapsed
68.092 0.160 68.745
>
R looks pretty good in this comparison. I suspect Ubuntu has a rather
low optimization level or similar for octave.
As Jean G. has indicated, tests may measure the wrong sorts of things.
Nonetheless, there is a value -- they can help us check that builds have
been done with the right setup. And if we get very disparate performance
on machines of supposedly similar capability, we may need to look into
the awful details.
JN
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