How to implement coalesce efficiently in R

Question

Background

Several SQL languages (I mostly use postgreSQL) have a function called coalesce which returns the first non null column element for each row. This can b

Answer 1

On my machine, using Reduce gets a 5x performance improvement:

coalesce2 <- function(...) {
  Reduce(function(x, y) {
    i <- which(is.na(x))
    x[i] <- y[i]
    x},
  list(...))
}

> microbenchmark(coalesce(a,b,c),coalesce2(a,b,c))
Unit: microseconds
               expr    min       lq   median       uq     max neval
  coalesce(a, b, c) 97.669 100.7950 102.0120 103.0505 243.438   100
 coalesce2(a, b, c) 19.601  21.4055  22.8835  23.8315  45.419   100