With Missings, Julia is slower than R

[jling]

@Yifan_Liu

Julia is not always faster than R and Python.

there are always multiple levels of understanding to this story. In this case, a relevant point is:

@nalimilan

R’s sum is implemented in C, so being only twice slower than it in pure Julia is already quite good. If you write a sum in pure R, it will be much slower than that! More fundamentally, the fact that writing the loop manually gives a better performance means that we should be able to match R relatively easily, and probably beat it at least in some cases.

More importantly, in almost all cases, Julia can fix the problem by writing idiomatic Julia code, instead of MUST relying on C/C++/Fortran subroutine like you see in Python/R.

If you compare the time R/Python people spent in writing C/C++ code to the time someone in Julia community casually writing PRs to make a specific use faster, hopefully you’d see the qualitative difference and the long-term implication of this.