[R-SIG-Mac] How to make Mac 64-bit version feature complete?

[Berend Hasselman]

On 16-12-2011, at 17:20, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> On Dec 14, 2011, at 11:38 AM, Timothy Bates wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 14 Dec 2011, at 4:24 PM, Adam Strzelecki wrote:
>>>> In addition, there is no benefit in creating universal binaries, since they are very Darwin-specific and bring no benefit in this context.
>>> 
>>> There's a huge benefit of doing that. I do develop Mac apps, and FAT binaries and libs makes the other apps referring to them to refer to single file path regardless of architecture. So this is benefit for developers. Another benefit is for Mac users, that they run single app regardless if they run on PPC, i386 only Intel (first Intel Macs ?!) or latest 64-bit Macs.
>> 
>> 
>> I’ll second that: It makes AppleScripting easier too: Calling “R.app” always works, instead of every user having to customise scripts with their app version R64.app vs R.app
>> 
> 
> That is fair enough. Do other users have an opinion either way?
> 

(Using Mac OS X 10.6.8)

Most of the time I use R 32-bit.
Currently my machine has 4Gb memory so 64-bit is not needed.
I have found that quite often 32-bit R runs faster than the 64-bit version.

In Terminal on the commandline we have R32, R64 and R (which is 64-bit).

So to have R.app be 32-bit looks a bit odd.

I don't like the Finder way to make applications start in 32-bit or 64-bit mode (Get Info and check a box).
Also for a user with no permissions to fiddle in /Applications this would make life difficult.

My suggestion would be the following:

R32.app ==> runs 32-bit R
R64.app ==> runs 64-bit R

R.app could be the main application responding to applescript "R.app", defaulting to 64-bit.
And R32 and R64 somehow start R in 32-bit and 64-bit mode respectively.

Or R32 and R64 are separate applications both responding to "R.app" (this precludes both running simultaneously?).
And R.app an alias to one  of the above.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Berend


> 
>> I work around this by deleting one binary and renaming R64 to R.app
>> 
> 
> You can simply run
> 
> lipo -create /Applications/R.app/Contents/MacOS/R \
> /Applications/R64.app/Contents/MacOS/R \
> -o /Applications/R.app/Contents/MacOS/R 
> 
> That will create the 3-way universal R.app as discussed.
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon
> 
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