Information is leaking out on R 2.14 (rstats)

Yesterday at JSM in Miami, Luke Tierney talked about some of the new features that will be included in R 2.14 (#rstats to you twitter addicts). It is not a surprise given the venue of JSM  and one of the few complaints of R that some of the new features are all about speed, speed, speed.

The first feature is that the byte compiler introduced with R version 2.13 for R developers to use on their own functions with up to a 5X speed up will be included in R 2.14. This means that all standard functions and packages will be pre-compiled into byte-code. This is a god send for R users like me who have had to accept slow code because we could not speed it up by calling C code and operations. It may also end people complaining about the speed of Hadley Wickham's ggplot2. Well, probably not but ggplot gets its fair share of love. I went to a talk by Amy Szczepanski from the University of Tennessee at the last Boston Area useRs group, and her group does a lot of cool HPC stuff which ggplot2 and other packages by Hadley Wickham.

Tierney also said that the new version may make transparent use of parallel processing for some operations on multi-cores. This is great news as I have always felt that parallel processing, and easy or automatic implementation of parallel processing is a critical component to the development of R. The growth of cloud computing has made it even more so.

If you can not wait for the release later this year there is a development version available for download.