How to make Mac 64-bit version feature complete?
On Dec 7, 2011, at 9:07 AM, Adam Strzelecki wrote:
Hello R Community, I have recently started using R for my PhD work. Aside of that I am Mac and iOS developer since few years. As far I can see R package for Mac comes in two flavors, R (32-bit) and R64 (64-bit).
Most of them build as universal unless you do the make/compile stuff on your own. The compile object code gets put in the .../pckgname/ libs/ directory and mine have x86_64, ppc, and i386 subdirectories. http://r.research.att.com/
Correct [me] if I am wrong, but the only reason of such separation (rather doing single universal version for all PPC, i386 and x86_64) is Carbon dependency for various R packages? So 32-bit version is the one that uses native Quartz or OpenGL rendering, while 64-bit version is the one that can drive over 2GB of memory but falls back to X11 as Carbon isn't available for 64-bit. Can anyone tell me what are the packages that still relay on Carbon (quartz renderer, rgl? anything else) that would need to be ported to Cocoa so 64-bit version will offer full functionality as 32-bit counterparts on Mac, instead of falling back to X11? I guess I could help quickly porting these parts into Cocoa, so we got single (3 architecture) binary.
I am running 64 bit Mac almost exclusively with the Mac GUI, and X11 is only loaded for a few packages that rely on its windowing (typically ones that rely on TcL/Tk). I believe the 32 bit version addresses whatever portion of 4 GB is not occupied by system or other programs (not 2 GB) and would be faster and more memory efficient if were used on a machine with memory limited to 4 GB. There are two GUIs, one 32 bit and one 64 bit and they both use Quartz. I'm reasonably sure the Tcl/Tk dependency on X11 is cross-architecture.
Cheers, -- Adam Strzelecki | nanoant.com BTW. Who's the Mac package maintainer in R project?
Simon Urbanek. He reads this list regularly and will be by to correct my errors.
David Winsemius, MD West Hartford, CT