[R-SIG-Mac] Current recommendations for compilers on OS X 10.4

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jan 14, 2006, at 3:17 PM, Seth Falcon wrote:

> Can someone confirm the recommended compiler and fortran to use for
> building R-devel from source on 10.4.x?
>
> I have been  using gcc 3.3 and it has been working fine.  Last I
> checked (months ago) gfortran wasn't ready for prime time and the
> recommendation was to do gcc_select 3.3.  Is that still the case?
>
> The wiki [1] seems to indicate that gcc 4.0 is what I should be using.
>

Well, the Wiki says "Using gcc4 is currently discouraged unless  
necessary, because gfortran is not stable enough (yet). However, you  
are free to give it a shot (useful for 64-bit R - see below, or G5- 
optimized R - see OptimizingR)." so I would say it indicates the  
opposite ;).

The situation got worse, in fact, because recent Apple build versions  
of gfortran don't compile at all. However, you can still use older  
versions of gfortran which (sort of) work.

Incidentally, we have been chasing some nasty compiler bugs in gcc4  
just last week, and the global consensus concerning gcc in general is  
still to avoid gcc4 on production systems (unless necessary, e.g. you  
can't get around gcc4 for 64-bit ppc version of R). Yesterday's Xcode  
update still contains 4.0.1, so I suspect that Apple is currently  
more focused on getting the Intel machines going...

Cheers,
Simon