[Rd] R, Wine, and multi-threadedness.

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Marc Schwartz (via MN) wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 16:45 +0100, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
>> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> <snipped>
>>>> Now, the interesting questions are: (1) is Atlas multi-threaded on
>>>> *every* platform, or more specifically, on Windows?,
>>>
>>>
>>> By default it is not multi-threaded on any platform, and we have not
>>> succeeded in compiling a multi-threaded version on Windows except by
>>> using Cygwin extensions (i.e. not actually on Windows).
>>
>> Thanks for the explanations. As I said, my main interests in running
>> R under Wine is mostly about having a GUI, but the multi-threading
>> possibility is an interesting discussion; also re-compiling
>> the whole lot (either for win32 or linux) just for the *possibility* of
>> speeding up is a bit painful, so having drop-in dll replacement
>> (or a shared-library replacement) for trying-out sounds rather attractive.
>
> Sorry for jumping in here and no disrespect intended to anyone, but I am
> confused relative to the desire and benefits of running R under Wine on
> Linux simply for the sake of using the RGui.exe menus, when there are
> other substantive tradeoffs relative to running R natively on Linux, as
> Prof. Ripley has noted.

One reason for doing so is to be able to prepare for teaching in a Windows 
environment: I believe this is why it is mentioned in the FAQ.  (I 
personally test on the machine to be used just to be sure things work.)

> The one "advantage" that I had seen some time ago, was the possibility
> of being able to generate metafile graphics for inclusion with MS Office
> apps by using the native Windows libs (in a dual-boot scenario as I
> recall). However other substantively better options for generating high
> quality graphics have been proposed and discussed here frequently.

I am not 100% convinced that they are `substantively better' in all 
environments, and I still do that sometimes.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595