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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/08/take-advantage-compiler.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>Tomas Kalibera,  the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2016/000610.html" target="_blank">newest member</a> of the R Core Team, has been working for the last several years with fellow Core Team member Luke Tierney implementing R's byte-code compiler and interpreter. Byte-compiling R code often improves its speed of execution, and usually happens without you having to take any explicit action. R's base and recommended packages are compiled when R is installed, and your scripts and functions are automatically compiled &quot;just-in-time&quot; as you execute them. </p>
<p>At the useR!2017 conference last month, Tomas Kalibera gave a very interesting talk: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conferences/useR-International-R-User-2017-Conference/Taking-Advantage-of-the-Byte-Code-Compiler" target="_blank">Taking Advantage of the Byte Compiler</a>. In particular, he shows that not all R code is equivalent to the byte compiler. For example, the byte compiler has most impact on code that works with scalar arithmetic in tight loops. There's also some kinds of R code that takes a relatively long time to compile, which can swamp the performance benefits if the function is compiled at execution-time. (Package authors can avoid this for their users by declaring that their packages be compiled on install, by including <code>Byte-Compile: yes</code> in the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#The-DESCRIPTION-file" target="_blank">DESCRIPTION</a> file.) For package authors and R users that care about performance, you can find lots of tips like this in the talk embedded below.</p>
<p><iframe width="450" allowfullscreen="" src="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conferences/useR-International-R-User-2017-Conference/Taking-Advantage-of-the-Byte-Code-Compiler/player" height="288"></iframe></p>
<p>For even more details on the implementation of the byte-compiler, take a look at the document <em><a rel="nofollow" href="http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/compiler/compiler.pdf" target="_blank">A Byte Compiler for R</a></em> by Luke Tierney.</p>
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