[Rd] Question about R developpment

[Martyn Plummer]

I would describe MRO as a distribution of R, in the same way that Fedora, Debian, SUSE etc are distributions of Linux. It is not fundamentally different from the version of R that you can download from CRAN but the binary builds offer some specific features:

1) The binary build is linked to the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) which may increase the speed of some matrix operations
2) Packages are downloaded from MRAN, Microsoft's time-stamped copy of CRAN. This can help with reproducibility of analyses that rely on CRAN packages.

As far as I know, all of the additional packages that are bundled with MRO are freely distributable and also available from CRAN. As Roy points out, both Microsoft and the R Foundation are partners in the R Consortium. So we do talk to each other as well as other stakeholders who participate in the Consortium.

Martyn
________________________________________
From: R-devel <r-devel-bounces at r-project.org> on behalf of Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
Sent: 11 June 2017 00:09
To: Morgan; r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] Question about R developpment

On 10/06/2017 2:38 PM, Morgan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had a question that might not seem obvious to me.
>
> I was wondering why there was no patnership between microsoft the R core
> team and eventually other developpers to improve R in one unified version
> instead of having different teams developping their own version of R.

As far as I know, there's only one version of R currently being
developed.  Microsoft doesn't offer anything different; they just offer
a build of a slightly older version of base R, and a few packages that
are not in the base version.

Duncan Murdoch

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