Handy Apply-based R Progress Bars

In a funny congruence with my post on R progress bars, Mark Heckmann just posted about some wrappers for the apply functions in R. He wrote up some functions that imitate sapply, lapply and apply but automatically add a progress bar so you can monitor the progress. They work very nice since you can just substitute his apply_pb‘s in place of R’s standard apply‘s. He says it’s a bit of a performance drag but after testing a bit it looks like they really shouldn’t add much overhead at all if there’s any major calculations inside the loop. Very handy.