System call overhead

Hi

I know there are many programming gurus who say no-no to invoking system calls because of overheads and what not. But the way I see it, if I am to run a relatively sophisticated model (say, statistical), the packages of which are available in a scripting language like R or python, don't the benefits of invoking a system call to a run a script in terms of reduced hassle and programmer time outweigh the costs of implementing the model on C++ if there aren't any off the shelf libraries in the former out there.

Are there any gotchas that i am missing ?

Thanks for replies,
Last edited on
Do those gurus means "system" as the system function, or OS-depending calls?
system function stdlib.h
So how is it faster?
You Should actually NEVER use system.
You can create your own "scripting system". But system isn't good at all. http://www.cplusplus.com/articles/j3wTURfi/
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