Dmitry Kisler has a quick comparison of looping speed in Python and R:
This post is about R versus Python in terms of the time they require to loop and generate pseudo-random numbers. To accomplish the task, the following steps were performed in Python and R (1) loop 100k times (ii is the loop index) (2) generate a random integer number out of the array of integers from 1 to the current loop index ii (ii+1 for Python) (3) output elapsed time at the probe loop steps: ii (ii+1 for Python) in [10, 100, 1000, 5000, 10000, 25000, 50000, 75000, 100000]
The findings were mostly unsurprising to me, though there was one unexpected twist.