It'a actually a little complicated but if you're interested in the details check out this stack overflow thread [1]. High level summary is that lapply() and fun

It'a actually a little complicated but if you're interested in the details check out this stack overflow thread [1]. High level summary is that lapply() and functions built on top of it do some work in native C and so are generally faster but not all of the *apply() functions are faster. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2275896/is-rs-apply-family-more-than-syntactic-sugar http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2275896/is-rs-apply-famil...