Excited about the near future...

Since I've posted this a month ago, several persons have been emailing
me offline asking what I'm referring to.  From the NEWS of R v2.13.0
(released today):

Package 'compiler' is now provided as a standard package. See
?compiler::compile for information on how to use the compiler. This
package implements a byte code compiler for R: by default the compiler
is not used in this release. See the ?R Installation and
Administration Manual? for how to compile the base and recommended
packages.

The fact that it is now a standard package means everyone will have it
installed by default, which means it is much more likely to get lots
of real CPU mileage.

The 'compiler' package has been a long-term effort by Luke Tierney.
He has some nice talks/slides on this:

http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/


Yesterday, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote a piece about the compiler on his
blog 'Thinking inside the box':

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2011/04/12/


/Henrik

PS. Stephen Milborrow's package 'jit' provides a just-in-time compiler
iff used with his Ra build of R.  It seems to be a discontinued
project though.

Some already know, but I think it deserves a bit of a attention here as well:

It looks like we're about to get new features in R that will be very powerful!

That should be a good enough teaser for now...

/Henrik

PS ...and thanks for making it available plus credits to similar
efforts by others.