[northlondoner]

blubber, I think there might be some misconceptions. Just for the record.

R is not actually competing with those languages. R's design purpose is different. it is a general purpose computational language for scientists. There are FFIs (Foreign Function Interfaces) for all those languages.

R-Kotlin-Jave: https://journal.r-project.org/articles/RJ-2018-066/ R-Rust: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/using_rust.html R-C# : https://github.com/Open-Systems-Pharmacology/rsharp/

R is supporting C integration natively anyhow (see Chambers's book.

Regarding VB reference. VB was used in finance a lot to do some advanced maths. just a side remark.