Fast vector math in Clojure / Incanter

Question

I\'m currently looking into Clojure and Incanter as an alternative to R. (Not that I dislike R, but it just interesting to try out new languages.) I like Incanter and find the s

Answer 1

All the comments thus far are by people who don't seem to have much experience speeding up Clojure code. If you want Clojure code to perform identical to Java - the facilities are available to do so. It may make more sense however to defer to mature Java libraries like Colt or Parallel Colt for vector math. It may make sense to use Java arrays for the absolute highest performance iteration.

@Shane's link is so full of outdated information to be hardly worth looking at. Also @Shane's comment that code is slower than by factor of 10 is simply inaccurate (and unsupported http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/compare.php?lang=clojure, and these benchmarks don't account for the kinds of optimization possible in 1.2.0 or 1.3.0-alpha1). With a little bit of work it's usually easy to get Clojure code w/in 4X-5X. Beyond that usually requires a deeper knowledge of Clojure's fast paths - something isn't widely disseminated as Clojure is a fairly young language.

Clojure is plenty fast. But learning how to make it fast is going to take a bit of work/research as Clojure discourages mutable operations and mutable datastructures.