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As a rule, everything I discover in R has already been discussed by Hadley Wickham. In this case, he writes:Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
The reason why the C++ function is faster is subtle, and relates to memory management. The R version needs to create an intermediate vector the same length as y (x – ys), and allocating memory is an expensive operation. The C++ function avoids this overhead because it uses an intermediate scalar.In my case, I want to count the number of items in a vector below a certain threshold. R will allocate a new vector for the result of the comparison, and then sum over that vector. It’s possible to speed that up about ten-fold by directly counting in C++:
Often this won’t be the bottleneck, but may be useful at some point.
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