New version of Rtools for Windows

On 07/01/2015 5:20 PM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 8:00 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

This version includes only minor updates to the tools.  I indicated last summer that I was hoping to update GCC from the current version 4.6.3 before the R 3.2.0 release, but this now looks unlikely, unless someone else with experience building it can help.

I have been looking into this a bit over the past few months, also
with mixed success. Nevertheless, below some experiences that might be
worth sharing.

The guys from mingw-w64 recommended (quite strongly) to move away from
multilib. They explained that the standard approach is to create two
separate toolchains; one that targets win32 and the other one that
targets win64 (both tool chains can compiled for win32). Hence the
only difference for R would be that instead of passing "-m64" and
"-m32", it would need to set the path to the proper compiler.

There are several initiatives that provide very complete suites of
precompiled mingw-w64 tools. I think the ideal scenario would be if we
could take advantage of an existing tool chain as we do on other
platforms, although perhaps I do not fully understand the R-specific
requirements on the windows compiler.

I feel quite strongly that we need to be able to build the toolchain,
rather than relying on binaries produced by others.  We may need to
customize the toolchain, or we may need to rebuild it when a bug is
identified.  Lots of binary builders abandon their builds and you can't
count on them to solve problems at a later date.

One project that looks very promising is msys2 [1,2]. It has a package
manager (port of pacman from arch linux) and comes with a pretty
complete set of msys [3] and other [4] packages that seems quite well
maintained.

Do they post complete instructions for building?  That's what I'm
looking for.  I don't want to develop a build script (I don't know how),
but I would like to have one.

Duncan Murdoch

The only issue I ran into with msys2 is that it uses a different c++
exception model (seh/dwarf) than the current Rtools (which uses sjlj).
See also [5]. Therefore, if a library uses exceptions, we cannot use
the current Rtools to link a static library that was created with
msys2  [6]. I am not sure if it also be a problem the other way
around, and if this is still the case for recent versions of
gcc/mingw.

Finally, Ruby has build very similar to Rtools called DevKit-mingw64
[7] that we might be able to borrow from.


[1] https://msys2.github.io/
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25019057/how-are-msys-msys2-and-msysgit-related-to-each-other
[3] https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages
[4] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages
[5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15670169/what-is-difference-between-sjlj-vs-dwarf-vs-seh
[6] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7751640/undefined-reference-to-gxx-personality-sj0
[7] http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/