yes it was added in 4.1 > letters |> toupper() |> tail() [1] "U" "V" "W" "X" "Y" "Z" it only pipes into the first argument position

the piping is undone immediately (during parsing or thereabouts). you can't even quote the code quote(letters |> toupper() |> tail()) #> tail(toupper(letters)) so it has a performance advantage over magrittr pipe

Yes, its an in-parser transformation. And there is a performance benefit, but the primary benefit is in debugability, since with the native pipe (which is what '|>' is called in #rstats) you get a completely normal callstack.