Dear DevelopeRs, I'd like to ask those who develop R packages with compiled code to please try avoiding dependency on GCC (gcc/g77/gfortran/g++) specific features in the code, for the simple reason that there are non-GCC compilers out there that might choke on such features.
I found this out back when I was trying to build R-2.3.0-to-be on our dual Opteron based Scyld cluster. Because the GCC that shipped with the current Scyld is too old for building R properly on that architecture, we ended up using the Portland Group compilers (PGI 6.1). After some update in the R source, I got R to build and pass make check-all. However, when installing contributed packages on CRAN, quite a few failed. I manually checked a handful, and found that some of the code defined some basic math functions that conflicts with intrinsics. Removal of such code enable me to build and run package checks on them successfully. I believe many of such cases stem from the fact that the code were originally from the output of g2c. I can try to post a more concrete example if needed. I think resolving this will facilitate wider use of these packages. Thanks for your consideration. Best, Andy Andy Liaw, PhD Biometrics Research PO Box 2000 RY33-300 Merck Research Labs Rahway, NJ 07065 andy_liaw(a)merck.com 732-594-0820 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
