title: Julia's speed advantage over R
body: <p>I have been using R for my research in corporate finance and asset pricing, and really like it due to my background in Math and Statistics. Until now, I encountered 2 main constrains in R. The first one is handling big data files, but I have kind of circumvented it by combining R with PostgreSQL and Spark, and I believe I can get more RAM from high performance computer or AWS cloud in the future. The second constrain is executing speed (important for handling tick by tick security quote data), and I was recommended that Julia has huge speed advantage over R. My question is that since Rcpp offers a really fast execution, does the speed advantage of Julia still hold? I am considering if I should learn Julia.   </p>
  
  <p>In addition, R provides a perfect database connection with WRDS, Quandl, TrueFX, and TAQ, and I am really used to Hadley Wickham style data cleaning. As a academic guy, I kind of like the fact that R has support from peer review journals like Journal of Stat Software. I will try Julia and see how it works. Thanks for all the answers and comments!</p>