Using Rcpp

Contrary to what I sometimes like to believe, there are other computer programming languages than just R. R—and languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby—are considered high-level languages, because they offer a greater level of abstraction from computer representations and resource management than the lower-level languages. For example, in some lower level languages, you must specify the data type of the variables you create and manage the allocation of RAM manually—C, C++, and Fortran are of this type.

The high level of abstraction R provides allows us to do amazing things very quickly—like import a data set, run a linear model, and plot the data and regression line in no more than 4 lines of code! On the other hand, nothing quite beats the performance of carefully crafted lower-level code. Even so, it would take hundreds of lines of code to run a linear model in a low-level language, so a language like that is inappropriate for agile analytics.

One solution is to use R abstractions...