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Question about R developpment

7 messages · Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal, Martyn Plummer, Andrie de Vries +2 more

Original
Morgan
# 
Hi,

I had a question that might not seem obvious to me.

I was wondering why there was no patnership between microsoft the R core
team and eventually other developpers to improve R in one unified version
instead of having different teams developping their own version of R.

Is it because they don't want to team up? Is it because you don't want? Any
particular reasons? Different philosophies?

Thank you
Kind regards
Morgan
Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal
# 
https://www.r-consortium.org

-Roy
**********************
"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."
**********************
Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
***Note new street address***
110 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Phone: (831)-420-3666
Fax: (831) 420-3980
e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/

"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
"From those who have been given much, much will be expected" 
"the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK Jr.
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 10/06/2017 2:38 PM, Morgan wrote:
As far as I know, there's only one version of R currently being 
developed.  Microsoft doesn't offer anything different; they just offer 
a build of a slightly older version of base R, and a few packages that 
are not in the base version.

Duncan Murdoch
Martyn Plummer
# 
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
Andrie de Vries
# 
Martyn and Duncan are both correct. 

I am on the Microsoft team that creates and distributes Microsoft R Open
(MRO).  We make absolutely no changes to R at all, just some enchancements
in the distribution.  As already pointed out:
* We add the Intel MKL to replace the built-in BLAS. This is similar to
replacing the BLAS with OpenBLAS or Atlas - readily available for Linux
distributions of R
* We make some changes in the RProfile.site file, notably pointing to an
MRAN snapshot, in turn a timestamped mirror of CRAN
* We add some package, e.g. foreach and iterators - all of these packages
are on CRAN.

In Microsoft R Client and Microsoft R Server we go further:
* We add proprietary packages that add scalability and connectivity to SQL
Server, Hadoop and other big data platforms
* But, again, the underlying R code remains unchanged.

In addition, Microsoft provides bug fixes and other enhancements to R
itself.

Microsoft remains committed to supporting both the R Foundation and the R
Consortium.

I hope this helps.

Andrie

(Andrie de Vries, Senior Programme Manager, Microsoft)
(You can also contact me at mailto:adevries at microsoft.com)

-----Original Message-----
From: R-devel [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Martyn
Plummer
Sent: 10 June 2017 16:06
To: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>; Morgan
<2005.morgan at gmail.com>; r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] 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
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 10/06/2017 6:09 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
Actually, I think my first sentence above is wrong.  Besides the base R 
that the core R team works on, there are a few other implementations of 
the language:  pqR, for instance.  But as others have said, the 
Microsoft product is simply a repackaging of the core R, so my second 
sentence is right.

Duncan Murdoch
1 day later
Morgan
# 
Thank you all for these explanations.
Kind regards,
Morgan
On 11 Jun 2017 02:47, "Duncan Murdoch" <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: