[ColFrancis]

R is from ~2000, while pandas started in 2011. Is it possible that the lack of compute power had an effect on the required performance characteristics?

[nojito]

data.table is basically a highly optimized C library

https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table

[noir_lord]

That's somewhat like libvips which was started when a 486 was state of the art - fast forward and it's an image processing monster.

[juancb]

R is much older than 2000, it's from 1993.

[andylynch]

And it’s an implementation of S, originally from Bell Labs in 1976

[ColFrancis]

Thank you, my brief research led to a list of versions that had R 1.0 as 2000, but it appears that v0 lasted a good many years. Pandas as well was in v0 for many years so it is the better comparison to use like-for-like.