JuliaLang/julia — Issue #514: R version used for performance comparison too old
Author: szhorvat
Created: 2012-03-04 12:57:54+00:00
State: open

The performance comparison shown on http://julialang.org/ indicates that R version 2.9.0 was used. This is a 3 year old (!) version of R. The [current version is 2.14.2](https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2012/000550.html) which has a [byte compiler](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/08/with-byte-compiler-r-214-will-be-even-faster.html) which speeds it up considerable.

I believe that for a comparison to be useful at all, it should use recent releases of the systems it compares. Of course a newer version of R most likely won't beat Julia either, but it seems kind of pointless to include R at all in the comparison if the version that is used is so terribly outdated, especially considering the recent performance improvements R has received.