[Rd] switch to reference counting in R-devel

[Henrik Bengtsson]

This is very exciting news.  Luke, thank you for all your work on this
- I know it's been a long journey.

All the best,

Henrik

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:04 AM Tierney, Luke <luke-tierney using uiowa.edu> wrote:
>
> R-devel has been switched to use reference counting by default with
> r77508. Building with -DSWITCH_TO_NAMED goes back to the NAMED
> mechanism.
>
> Best,
>
> luke
>
> On Sun, 24 Nov 2019, luke-tierney using uiowa.edu wrote:
>
> > Baring any unforeseen issues R-devel will switch in about a week from
> > the NAMED mechanism to reference counting for determining when objects
> > can be safely mutated in base C code. This is expected to have minimal
> > impact on packages not using unsupported coding practices in their C
> > code.
> >
> >
> > The transition to reference counting has been in progress for a
> > number of years. Some older notes on this are available at
> > http://developer.r-project.org/Refcnt.html.  These may no longer be
> > completely accurate but should give you an idea of what is going on.
> >
> > If you want to test your package under reference counting you can do
> > so by building R with -DSWITCH_TO_REFCNT added to CFLAGS or DEFS in a
> > config.site file.
> >
> > A small number of packages are still using the NAMED or SET_NAMED
> > functions even though this has been discouraged for some  time.
> > For now these will not produce errors but also not do anything useful.
> > They will probably be removed before R 4.0.0 is released, so you
> > should look at why you are using them and adjust accordingly.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > luke
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
> Luke Tierney
> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
> University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
> Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
>     Actuarial Science
> 241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney using uiowa.edu
> Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
>
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