switch to reference counting in R-devel
R-devel has been switched to use reference counting by default with r77508. Building with -DSWITCH_TO_NAMED goes back to the NAMED mechanism. Best, luke
On Sun, 24 Nov 2019, luke-tierney at uiowa.edu wrote:
Baring any unforeseen issues R-devel will switch in about a week from the NAMED mechanism to reference counting for determining when objects can be safely mutated in base C code. This is expected to have minimal impact on packages not using unsupported coding practices in their C code. The transition to reference counting has been in progress for a number of years. Some older notes on this are available at http://developer.r-project.org/Refcnt.html. These may no longer be completely accurate but should give you an idea of what is going on. If you want to test your package under reference counting you can do so by building R with -DSWITCH_TO_REFCNT added to CFLAGS or DEFS in a config.site file. A small number of packages are still using the NAMED or SET_NAMED functions even though this has been discouraged for some time. For now these will not produce errors but also not do anything useful. They will probably be removed before R 4.0.0 is released, so you should look at why you are using them and adjust accordingly. Best, luke
Luke Tierney
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu