I would like to change row names values from a first data frame if these rows names are present in another data frame, and change it to a corresponding value (defined in the second data frame). I could do it with a for loop, but I wonder what would be some other more suitable ways to do it in R.

Here is a toy dataset (my real dataset has 10^5 rows):

df <- data.frame("sample_1" = rep(0,3), "sample_2" = rep(0,3), row.names = paste0('gene_', seq(1, 3)), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
annotation <- data.frame("gene" =  paste0('gene_', seq(1, 2)), 'name' = paste0('name_', seq(1, 2)), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
df$gene <- rownames(df)

Initial data frames:

df 
       sample_1 sample_2   gene
gene_1        0        0 gene_1
gene_2        0        0 gene_2
gene_3        0        0 gene_3

annotation
    gene   name
1 gene_1 name_1
2 gene_2 name_2

Solution found:

for (x in rownames(df)){
  if (x %in% annotation$gene){
    df[x,]$gene <- annotation$name[which(annotation$gene == x)]
  }
}
rownames(df) <- df$gene
df$gene <- NULL

Resulting data frame:

df
       sample_1 sample_2
name_1        0        0
name_2        0        0
gene_3        0        0