[Rd] New version of Rtools for Windows

[Henric Winell]

On 2015-01-08 02:31, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On 07/01/2015 5:20 PM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 8:00 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> This version includes only minor updates to the tools.  I indicated last summer that I was hoping to update GCC from the current version 4.6.3 before the R 3.2.0 release, but this now looks unlikely, unless someone else with experience building it can help.
>>
>> I have been looking into this a bit over the past few months, also
>> with mixed success. Nevertheless, below some experiences that might be
>> worth sharing.
>>
>> The guys from mingw-w64 recommended (quite strongly) to move away from
>> multilib. They explained that the standard approach is to create two
>> separate toolchains; one that targets win32 and the other one that
>> targets win64 (both tool chains can compiled for win32). Hence the
>> only difference for R would be that instead of passing "-m64" and
>> "-m32", it would need to set the path to the proper compiler.
>>
>> There are several initiatives that provide very complete suites of
>> precompiled mingw-w64 tools. I think the ideal scenario would be if we
>> could take advantage of an existing tool chain as we do on other
>> platforms, although perhaps I do not fully understand the R-specific
>> requirements on the windows compiler.
>
> I feel quite strongly that we need to be able to build the toolchain,
> rather than relying on binaries produced by others.  We may need to
> customize the toolchain, or we may need to rebuild it when a bug is
> identified.  Lots of binary builders abandon their builds and you can't
> count on them to solve problems at a later date.
>
>>
>> One project that looks very promising is msys2 [1,2]. It has a package
>> manager (port of pacman from arch linux) and comes with a pretty
>> complete set of msys [3] and other [4] packages that seems quite well
>> maintained.
>
> Do they post complete instructions for building?  That's what I'm
> looking for.  I don't want to develop a build script (I don't know how),
> but I would like to have one.

Have you looked at nuwen's distro (http://nuwen.net/mingw.html)?  It's 
up-to-date (mingw-w64 3.3.0, binutils 2.25, GCC 4.9.2, ...) and includes 
the build scripts.


Henric



>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>>
>> The only issue I ran into with msys2 is that it uses a different c++
>> exception model (seh/dwarf) than the current Rtools (which uses sjlj).
>> See also [5]. Therefore, if a library uses exceptions, we cannot use
>> the current Rtools to link a static library that was created with
>> msys2  [6]. I am not sure if it also be a problem the other way
>> around, and if this is still the case for recent versions of
>> gcc/mingw.
>>
>> Finally, Ruby has build very similar to Rtools called DevKit-mingw64
>> [7] that we might be able to borrow from.
>>
>>
>> [1] https://msys2.github.io/
>> [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25019057/how-are-msys-msys2-and-msysgit-related-to-each-other
>> [3] https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages
>> [4] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages
>> [5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15670169/what-is-difference-between-sjlj-vs-dwarf-vs-seh
>> [6] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7751640/undefined-reference-to-gxx-personality-sj0
>> [7] http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
>>
>
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