guido@sirio.stat.unipd.it writes:
rgnwbin.tgz and rgnwsrc.tgz are the first results of an attempt to build R for Win95 and WinNT using egcs-mingw32. The advantages over the binaries for MsWindows that can be found in CRAN are: 1. R seems to run faster. Some simple (perhaps too simple) benchmarks point to a 20% gain. 2. The port is based on a more recent version (0.61.1) and it is more complete (more "system calls": system, tempfile, unlink, WinExec - to launch applications without waiting for the result; support for the standard help system: try help(), help(abline), help(line,eda), ?women, data(), library()) 3. A new menu item "Stop current computation" make possible to interupt long computation (but only when something is printed). 4. Since egcs-mingw32 uses the standard C calling convention, you don't need a Watcom compiler to build dynamic link libraries. Indeed, this was my original motivation. 5. It should be easy to use some other gnu-win32 compilers (maybe running on a non MsWindows machine). It should be easy to adapt the port to lcc-win32, too.
One piece of bad news is that it doesn't work on Win3.X systems (win32s). The PE-COFF object files that mingw32 makes simply won't load, even for a "Hello, world" example. The most likely candidate to get something running on that platform (I, for one, still have quite a few students with older notebooks and/or upgrade paranoia) seems to be RSXNT, but it's not all that simple. It's also GCC-based, but the "specs" file is set up differently from the mingw32/egcs one, which may create a great deal of "fun". RSXNT can (e.g.) be found at ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/dpmigcc/ I did a quick test and it does seem that a little fiddling makes it possible to compile e.g. wincons.c with mingw32 headers plus a few extra defines from the mingw32 specs file, so it would seem to be doable, but it's hardly trivial. (Actually, this was with the ordinary Linux GCC, but it's the header files that always cause trouble). I also haven't got the foggiest about how to create DLL's with RSXNT, especially how to to the important callbacks to the R binary (call_R). And, there's no g77 in RSXNT, so you'd need f2c. Perhaps it would be easier to make the egcs cross-platform tools once and for all? In any case, we need to do an "official" collection of tools. I tried to compile using Guido's files during Easter, but immediately got stopped by the absence of an "ls" command...
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._