[R-SIG-Mac] GCC v. LLVM

[Simon Urbanek]

On Mar 18, 2011, at 1:22 PM, Ken Knoblauch wrote:

> Anirban Mukherjee <anirban.mukherjee <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> 
>> Folks,
>> 
>> I was wondering what the forward plans are for R on Mac vis-a-vis
>> apple-gcc/Clang. Xcode 4 was just released with LLVM 2.x. From what I
>> can tell, Apple will in the future only support Clang/LLVM. For now, I
>> believe they are still including the same gcc as with 3.2. But longer
>> term, the move seems to be to Clang/LLVM.
>> 
>> http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html
>> http://clang.llvm.org/
>> 
>> Does R build with Clang/LLVM? I know Clang is being developed with a
>> view to ensure GCC "compatibility".
>> 
>> Best,
>> Anirban
>> 
> Just saw the following post on Mac OS X hints entitled:
> 
> Restoring PPC, SDK 10.4/10.5 and GCC 4.0 Support to Xcode4 
> 
> http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110318050811544
> 
> According to the author, this already appeared on Stack Overflow so
> perhaps many have already seen it.  
> 
> Is it a method to be recommended?
> 

You can always use older SDKs, that has been true for both Mac OS X and iOS - I don't have an issue with that (it's especially useful in the iOS world ;)).

However, hacking Xcode4 to accept the old compilers sounds little radical to me (we don't use gcc4.0 and don't plan to support 10.4 anyway so it is not needed for R). It's definitely not something I would recommend for the casual user. But then, a casual used has no need for it, so it all sounds very hypothetical to me ;).

Cheers,
Simon