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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Dec 16, 2011, at 12:50 PM, David Winsemius wrote:

> 
> On Dec 16, 2011, at 11:20 AM, 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?
>> 
> 
> I've never had any confusion at that level of using R.app or R64.app. I was really grateful that R64 was there when I needed it. There was some confusion about package availability for the 64-bit version a couple of years ago, but that seems to have faded away.
> 
>> 
>>> 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.
> 
> I don't read system commands very well. On my laptop with a hardware restriction to 4GB will that load R64.app if it's not needed?
> 

Yes (practically). The above "lipo" command merges the 64-bit binary from R64.app into R.app (and thus R64.app becomes superfluous). By default this would make OS X 10.6+ pick 64-bit on machines that support it, even if they don't need it. You can override that behavior in the Finder, though. I'm not suggesting that it's a good thing, it's for those that would prefer just a single R.app for everything - which is what sparked this discussion.

Cheers,
Simon