[R] Old g++ in Rtools

[Jeff Newmiller]

Re why not more discussion... Well, one reason might be that this is topic belongs on the R-devel mailing list.

(Are you really thinking that this is a "free" boost with so many packages that need source edits to compile with the new compilers? There are over 5000 packages on CRAN... are you sending patches to all those maintainers?)
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On August 6, 2014 1:22:42 AM PDT, "Amos B. Elberg" <amos.elberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>I���m working on a Mac so ymmv, but I���ve been running benchmarks of
>vanilla R from cran vs. recompiles with different versions of gcc and
>R, and I see a speedup of 20-30% vs the cran binary after recompiling
>with gnu 4.9. ��Its quite distinct. ��
>
>Each jump in gcc revision (4.7-4.8, 4.8-4.9) seems to improve benchmark
>performance by around 10% over the previous generation. ��
>
>So there may be advantages to recompiling yourself.
>
>On the other hand, there may be potential issues compiling some
>packages. ��Some of the benchmarking I���ve been doing is 3.1.1 vs. pqR
>(distinctly faster than 3.1.1, even without ���helper threads���),
>which is based on R 2.15.0, which in turn forces you to use older
>versions of some packages, some of which have language-compatibility
>issues with recent compilers. ��The version of Rcpp that accepts R
>2.15.0, for example, won���t compile against gcc 4.9. ��You may find
>that the current versions of other packages have similar issues with
>recent gnu compilers, I can���t say. ��
>
>I���m surprised, frankly, that there isn���t more discussion of this,
>considering the size of the data and complexity of the problems people
>are feeding into R, and the possibility of essentially ���free���
>performance boosts.
>
>--��
>Amos Elberg
>Sent with Airmail
>
>From:��Rguy <rguy at 123mail.org>
>Reply:��Rguy <rguy at 123mail.org>>
>Date:��August 6, 2014 at 2:47:47 AM
>To:��r-help at r-project.org <r-help at r-project.org>>
>Subject:�� [R] Old g++ in Rtools  
>
>I recently downloaded Rtools. I see the g++ version is  
>gcc version 4.6.3 20111208 (prerelease) (GCC)  
>
>I also recently downloaded MinGW. Its version of g++ is  
>gcc version 4.8.1 (GCC)  
>
>I believe that later versions of g++ provide better support for C++11. 
>
>Why does Rtools provide a version considerably older than the latest?  
>Any plans to update the version?  
>Is it bad practice to compile with a later version when interfacing
>with R?  
>
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