search for: 3x1e7

Dear list. It is a known issue that accessing slots of S4 objects and in particular accessing .Data slots is slow in R. However, what surprises me are two things demonstrated in the code below (runnable with 'inline', my times are in the comments): - copying data out of a large 3x1e7 .Data slot into a matrix can be easily made 3-4 times faster than accessing a .Data slot which I believe grabs a reference (and as copying can be avoided the acceleration should be even more dramatic). It is surprising that this memory inefficient operation is faster than such a simple thing like g...