I've used it off and on for almost 4 years now (before Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics and it was called Revo R Open). There are things I liked and disliked about it.
Pros:
- easy to install
- easy to install Intel Math Kernel libraries to take advantage of multiple core CPUs
- matrix computation benchmarks do show performance improvements over base R
- MRO uses MRAN to install snapshots of packages from CRAN which allows for better reproducibility (in theory)
Cons:
- sometimes you can't upgrade or install packages because they have
depends on R #.#.# and you're MRO is still behind the latest. this would not be as difficult if package maintainers were careful about what R version they put in the Depends: section of their DESCRIPTION file instead of just relying on RStudio or devtools to build the package (which auto sets to the version of R it was last built on).
- upgrading between R versions is harder than just running a package management tool
upgrade or update command
- the reproducibility aspect only works if you fully buy in and use the
checkpoint feature to lock package versions... And so does everyone else on your team.
In my opinion, if you are doing mostly solo analysis on Mac or Windows, I would recommend giving MRO a try as the benefits are pretty good.
If you are a sysadmin (or data scientist, but often get to wear that hat as well like me), and you can fully control the development server/cluster that your colleagues will be working on, then it's very possibly a worthwhile experiment. It's really nice to require people to be responsible for using a specific version of a package instead of just knowing it by name (which MRO does automatically with checkpoint) and know that your setup will more efficiently use the full computing power available without necessarily needing to have analysts change their R code. You just have to be careful to communicate when doing upgrades, updates, installs, etc.
However, if most of your development is done on Linux and/or you want to typically deploy R code to Linux servers or docker containers, I would not recommend MRO. That extra effort of setup and maintenance that makes it harder to try and deal with when the Linux package mangers like apt and yum can deal with that stuff much more easily. Also, openblas is super easy to install on Linux (eg apt install openblas) and gets you 90% the performance boost of the Intel MKL most of the time.