Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1912031002260.3579@luke-Latitude-7480>
Date: 2019-12-03T16:04:00Z
From: Luke Tierney
Subject: switch to reference counting in R-devel
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.21.1911240826360.566@macbook-air-5.local>
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