[R] gcc 4.3 any known issues?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Stefan Grosse wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Fedora is for Fedora 9 switching to gcc 4.3. Before I test it (rawhide) I want
>> to be sure that R is running. So my question is whether there have been
>> issues compiling R + packages using 4.3?
>>
> I suspect that not many have tried.
>
> There is an R-2.6.2 RPM in Fedora 9 alpha, so _something_ seems to work.

But enough have to have sorted out many of the issues.  For example, the 
gcc 4.3 series uses C99-style inlining and that has been implemented 
(conditionally on GCC capabilities), and various bits of R have been 
rewritten to work around mis-compiles by the gcc 4.3 branch.

But note that gcc 4.3 is not released and not even branched with rather a 
lot of remaining regressions.  I'd be wary of using high levels of 
optimization: last time I looked R failed to build correctly at -O3 on 
x86_64, and there were more problems with packages.

Surely this is a topic that the posting guide directs to R-devel -- all 
the issues mentioned are programming ones, not R ones.


-- 
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)
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