[xtracto]

I use R every day for my research (doing social simulations sometimes based on sample surveys). An additional R limitation is the memory limit. R cannot use virtual memory and the maximum amount of data is limited.

There are two ways to deal with that, one is to load datasets through SQL database (using a SQL library) which IMHO is a "dirty hack". The other (what I usually do) is to load the huge datasets in STATA (or any other stats package) and filter the data to get a set that is small enough to work with R.

Other than that, the available libraries in R are crazy good. for example stuff like Approximate Bayesian Computation or survey analysis (considering weight factors) is straightforward with available libraries.