[disgruntledphd2]

I dunno about this. At work, we have an exhaustive model fitting procedure that takes a looooonnnng time.

I prototyped a quick julia implementation of a simple glm (almost identical code in Julia and R), and the julia code was approximately 10-20 times faster depending on the model.

This is definitely worth looking at (mind you, the costs of redevelopment of our code in Julia is probably prohibitive). That being said, this would encourage me to call out to julia from R for some of my more computationally heavy workloads.