[Rd] status of Java & rJava?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 29/03/2020 04:07, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> Spencer,
> 
> you could argue that Java is dead since Oracle effectively killed it by removing all public downloads, but if you manage to get hold of a Java installation then it works just fine with R. To my best knowledge there has never been an issue if you installed rJava from source. macOS Catalina has made binary distributions impossible due to additional restrictions on run-time, but even that has been how solved with the release of rJava 0.9-12, so please make sure you use the latest rJava. In most cases that I have seen issues were caused by incorrect configuration (setting JAVA_HOME incorrectly [do NOT set it unless you know what you're doing!], not installing Java for the same architecture as R etc.). If you have any issues feel free to report them. rJava 0.9-12 has quite a few changes that try to detect user errors better and report them so I strongly suggest users to upgrade.

There is OpenJDK, and https://adoptopenjdk.net provides binaries for 
macOS, including the preferred Java 11 LTS.  I just re-checked that, and 
after

env 
JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/adoptopenjdk-11.jdk/Contents/Home 
R CMD javareconf

I was able to install from source and check rJava 0.9-12 in 4.0.0 alpha. 
  For the CRAN binary of 3.6.3 I had to make sure I was using clang 7: 
'clang' defaults to that in the Apple CLT which does not support 
-fopenmp -- but the binary package just worked.

[All on Catalina.]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford