Skip to content
Prev 53644 / 63421 Next

Question about R developpment

I would describe MRO as a distribution of R, in the same way that Fedora, Debian, SUSE etc are distributions of Linux. It is not fundamentally different from the version of R that you can download from CRAN but the binary builds offer some specific features:

1) The binary build is linked to the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) which may increase the speed of some matrix operations
2) Packages are downloaded from MRAN, Microsoft's time-stamped copy of CRAN. This can help with reproducibility of analyses that rely on CRAN packages.

As far as I know, all of the additional packages that are bundled with MRO are freely distributable and also available from CRAN. As Roy points out, both Microsoft and the R Foundation are partners in the R Consortium. So we do talk to each other as well as other stakeholders who participate in the Consortium.

Martyn