macos 26 considerations

Gabor,

Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are 
you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?

Bill

On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25?PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
<r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
[...]
On 2026-02-22 09:15, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
update. But xquartz works fine as well.
Very interesting! I?m curious about the difference in your experience
and Prof Murdoch?s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you?ve
tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.
I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
library(rgl).

If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
server when loading the R_X11 dll.

G.
&#8203;
Bill,

on that front, Apple has again been making large breaking changes in Xcode (which they are often slow to fix; with Xcode 26.4 they are going from clang 19 to 21) so I?d definitely avoid going past Xcode 26.3 as that is too risky. That said, I think most of the growing pains in Tahoe have settled (you can pretty much consider x.0 alpha and x.1 beta with most macOS major releases).

Cheers,
Simon
On 4 Mar 2026, at 13:27, Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:

Gabor,

Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?

Bill

On 2026-02-22 11:47, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25?PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
<r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
[...]
On 2026-02-22 09:15, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
update. But xquartz works fine as well.
Very interesting! I?m curious about the difference in your experience
and Prof Murdoch?s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you?ve
tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.
I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
library(rgl).

If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
server when loading the R_X11 dll.

G.
&#8203;
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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Bill,

on that front, Apple has again been making large breaking changes in Xcode (which they are often slow to fix; with Xcode 26.4 they are going from clang 19 to 21) so I?d definitely avoid going past Xcode 26.3 as that is too risky. That said, I think most of the growing pains in Tahoe have settled (you can pretty much consider x.0 alpha and x.1 beta with most macOS major releases).
AFAIK Xcode/CLT 26.3 was released this week.  That includes Apple clang 
17 based mainly on LLVM 19 (but not for example the same default C++ 
standard which remains C++98).

26.4 is still in beta (and beta 2 fixed some big issues).  That includes 
Apple clang 21 based mainly on LLVM clang 21 (but with some things from 
22). This has default C++14 even though LLVM clang has defaulted to 17 
for some years.

In short, Apple may have caught up with LLVM version numbers, but not 
LLVM versions ....
Cheers,
Simon

On 4 Mar 2026, at 13:27, Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:

Gabor,

Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?

Bill

On 2026-02-22 11:47, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25?PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
<r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
[...]
On 2026-02-22 09:15, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
update. But xquartz works fine as well.
Very interesting! I?m curious about the difference in your experience
and Prof Murdoch?s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you?ve
tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.
I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
library(rgl).

If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
server when loading the R_X11 dll.

G.
&#8203;
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

_______________________________________________
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_______________________________________________
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R-SIG-Mac at r-project.org
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Brian D. Ripley,                  ripleybd at icloud.com
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
? pkgutil --pkg-info=com.apple.pkg.Xcode
package-id: com.apple.pkg.Xcode
version: 26.2.0.0.1.1764914756
volume: /
location: /
install-time: 1770242581

? xcode-select -p
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

? clang --version
Apple clang version 17.0.0 (clang-1700.6.3.2)
Target: arm64-apple-darwin25.3.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin

? sw_vers
ProductName: macOS
ProductVersion: 26.3
BuildVersion: 25D125

I don't have gfortran, I don't currently work on anything with fortran
code, and CRAN has binaries for R-devel as well.

G.
Gabor,

Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?

Bill

On 2026-02-22 11:47, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25?PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
<r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
[...]

On 2026-02-22 09:15, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
update. But xquartz works fine as well.

Very interesting! I?m curious about the difference in your experience
and Prof Murdoch?s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you?ve
tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.

I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
library(rgl).

If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
server when loading the R_X11 dll.

G.

&#8203;
Hi Simon,

As you know, the Apple antics resulted in the release-build machine getting ahead (clang 17) of the machines that builds the CRAN prereleases.

This mostly annoying for me since I only distribute source tarballs, so as long as it doesn't actually break compilation, we're fine. However, I can't use the CRAN package binaries, so everything needs to be compiled from source. And if I want to be able to (say) R CMD check on packages that act up on CRAN, sometimes they install everything including the kitchen sink via dependencies. 

I had planned to update my setup in the interim between 4.5.3 an 4.6.0. It might be a good idea to try and synchronize this time.

I take it that going to Tahoe + Xcode CLT 26.3 should be OK?

- Peter
On 4 Mar 2026, at 02.38, Simon Urbanek <Simon.Urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

Bill,

on that front, Apple has again been making large breaking changes in Xcode (which they are often slow to fix; with Xcode 26.4 they are going from clang 19 to 21) so I?d definitely avoid going past Xcode 26.3 as that is too risky. That said, I think most of the growing pains in Tahoe have settled (you can pretty much consider x.0 alpha and x.1 beta with most macOS major releases).

Cheers,
Simon

On 4 Mar 2026, at 13:27, Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:

Gabor,

Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?

Bill

On 2026-02-22 11:47, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25?PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
<r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
[...]
On 2026-02-22 09:15, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:

I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
update. But xquartz works fine as well.
Very interesting! I?m curious about the difference in your experience
and Prof Murdoch?s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you?ve
tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.
I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
library(rgl).

If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
server when loading the R_X11 dll.

G.
&#8203;
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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R-SIG-Mac at r-project.org
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_______________________________________________
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Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com