Thank you Gabor, Romain and Stefan.
Gabor this looks like really interesting for speeding up loops. I just have
to install it and add jit(1) before a loop ! Is the result faster than
Python ?
I have seen the name of L. Tierney among the contributors. I guess it is
good for MCMC :-)
Best,
Jean
2009/11/22 Stefan Evert <stefan.ev...@uos.de>
> Sure, badly written R code does not perform as well as well written
>> python code or C code. On the other hand badly written python code does not
>> perform as well as well written R code.
>>
>> What happens when you try one of these :
>>
>> sum <- sum( 1:N )
>>
>
> R runs out of memory and crashes. :-) I didn't tell you how big N is, did
> I?
>
> But this is exactly the point I was trying to make (but perhaps not
> prominently enough). In many cases, you can vectorize at least parts of
> your code or find a more efficient algorithm, which may be faster in R than
> a brute-force solution in C. But sometimes, you just cannot avoid loops
> (let's not forget that all the forms of apply() are just loops and don't
> give much of a speed benefit over a for-loop), function calls, etc.; in this
> case, performance differences between interpreted languages can matter.
>
> Personally, I'd never switch from R to Perl just for speed, though.
>
> BTW, I also tried a vectorised algorithm in R, which calculates the sum
> above in a small number of chunks:
>
> N1 <- 50
>> N2 <- 1000000
>> N <- N1 * N2
>> sum <- 0
>>
>> for (i in 1:N1) {
>> x <- as.numeric(i-1) * N2 + 1:N2
>> sum <- sum + sum(x)
>> }
>>
>
> which gives
>
> R/simple_count_vec.R 31.30 Mops/s (50000000 ops in 1.60 s)
>
> So an interpreted loop in Lua is still faster than this partially
> vectorized code in R:
>
>
> lua/simple_count.lua 65.78 Mops/s (100000000 ops in 1.52 s)
>>>
>>
> As people on the SQLite mailing list always say: there's no general answer
> as to which language/implementation/query/... is faster and better. You
> just have to test the different options for your specific application
> setting, and be prepared for one or two surprises.
>
> Just in case this isn't obvious: If I rewrote matrix multiplication in C
> and linked this code into R, it would run much slower than if I just typed
> "A %*% B".
>
> All the best,
> Stefan
>
>
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