I am today where Alastiar was back in August 2005.  I am considering buying
a 64 bit machine with 16GB of memory to run bigger objects in R, which
brougt me down the Linux path.  The problem is that my company's IT staff
doesn't support Linux and this path was getting very bumpy for me, so I am
oscilating back towards 64bit Windows.  I thought the lack of a 64
bit Windows binary was due to there being no open-source gcc compiler for
64bit Windows, but reading Prof. Ripley reply seems to imply that I could
not even buy a compiler and compiler the source code myself because there
are none that treat a long as 64 bits.  Is that the only remaining obstacle
and does that obstacle still exist?

Thanks,

Roger





On 8/19/05, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Alastair Cooper wrote:
>
> > I am looking at getting a PC preinstalled with Windows XP x64. What I
> > want to know is, has anyone successfully compiled a version of R for
> > 64-bit Windows (Amd64 - not Itanium), and if so did they find any
> > performance boost?
>
> Hmm, where do you get a reliable C99-compatible compiler for 64-bit
> Windows?  We don't know of one, and the R sources are written assuming
> long is 64-bit on a 64-bit platform (and that is not the Win64
> convention) so there would still be a lot of 32-bit restrictions until we
> change that (which is on my TODO list).
>
> (We don't support building R with VC++, and although there have been a
> number of attempts none has produced a version that passes make check: I
> recall finding VC++ thought -Inf > 3, for example.)
>
> Based on extensive experience on other platforms, I would expect a
> noticeable performance hit for a 64-bit build, but the ability to run
> bigger tasks: this is discussed with data and reasoning in the latest
> R-admin manual (in the R-devel version of R).
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>
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