I was on the Goto BLAS maillist yesterday, asking some question about relative speed/performance/tuning of Goto BLAS and (specifically) R. I received a reply from Kazushige Goto (the developer and maintainer of Goto BLAS), who as part of his answer to some of my queries made the following comment concerning R, which I pass along to the R development team: "By the way, please ask your R developer to rewrite memory allocation function including garbage collection. They give 4 byte offset memory region and never perform well (or it will cause segmentation fault. 4 byte offset is fatal). Since R use complex double precision, memory alignment should be at least 16 bytes..." Apparently, Goto has run into some issues with R before. I'll assume that some out there will be able to interpret Goto's comment/suggestion.