This chapter described a few simple tweaks to improve the speed of an R code. Some of the tweaks are well known, but often overlooked in practice; others are less obvious. Regardless of their nature, and despite their simplicity, these low hanging fruits can offer significant performance gains and sometimes even more than the advanced optimization discussed in subsequent chapters. As such, these tweaks should be taken as the first steps in order to optimize an R code.
In the next chapter, we will see how to take R's performance even further by using compiled code.