Why you will never see an R script coder package converter to C or C++ like Matlab Coder Toolbox

From a commenter at http://quantlabs.net/r-blog/2012/06/the-huge-edge-of-matlab-over-r-is-the-matlab-coder-toolbox-converting-r-script-code-to-cc/

Very solid reason!

Don’t hold your breath for an R to C convertor. The MATLAB Coder toolbox took about 7 years to make (from the first C generation code in 2004 to its release in 2011; see http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2011/11/14/generating-c-code-from-your-matlab-algorithms/), and was probably only possible by the extensive object oriented rewrite of MATLAB that happened around 2007-2008.

Since R is more flexible than MATLAB in many ways (you can do crazy things like reassign `=`), I wouldn’t think it is possible to auto convert any more than a small subset of R, without a *lot* of effort.

The case to similar to that of JavaScript. That too is a flexible language designed purely as a scripting language that people now want to speed up. The solution that modern browser creators have come up with is to compile the easy bits, optimise some of the rest, and leave the hard bits as they are.

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