[R-SIG-Mac] GCC Wiki GFortran

[Simon Urbanek]

On Aug 22, 2012, at 6:34 AM, Federico Calboli <f.calboli at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I used to be able to use the Fortran binaries provided by Simon for both R and Julia, but alas this will not be possible anymore:
> 
> "The problem is not BLAS, but your version of gfortran. Mac provides a built-in system blas, so it is not required to build our own. However, "checking for Fortran 77 name-mangling scheme... unknown" is a problem. It appears that the R version of gfortran is too old to build arpack (a quick google search reveals that gfortran older than 4.4 won't build code properly on 64 bit -- yours is 4.2.3) ."
> 
> I could install the GFortran from here: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries#MacOS. but (1) they will overwrite /usr/local/bin/gfortran (with a symlink) and (2) I don't know if it will work for R.
> 
> So, will the GCC binary work for R, or is it going to be utter PITA?  I'm on 10.8, Xcode 4.4.1 + CLI add-ons and all the other bells and whistles.
> 

They won't work with CRAN R binaries because they don't use Apple driver-drivers (i.e. they don't support -arch etc.)*. If you compile R from sources, you can use any Fortran binary you want - it will be tied to your particular runtime (and you can't use -arch).

BTW: The FSF Fortran installs in /usr/local/gfortran so it can peacefully co-exist with out CRAN Fortran -- even in our Fortran gfortran is just a symlink to gfortran-4.2 so you can easily restore it with
sudo ls -sfn gfortran-4.2 /usr/local/bin/gfortran
if you wish.

Cheers,
Simon

--- for advanced users only - if you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't do it ---

* - in theory you can use the Apple driver-driver of our Fortran to drive FSF-build Fortran. For example if you take the CRAN Fortran then renaming your FSF Fortran to i686-apple-darwin8-gfortran-4.2 and putting our driver instead of gfortran then you may have some luck using CRAN R with your FSF Fortran (obviously, -arch ppc won't work but fewer people care now ;)). There are some potential issues, though, for example the FSF binaries use purely dynamic setup so anything you compile can only be used on your machine. Also in theory you can have runtime version mismatch issues (two different versions of gfortran and gcc runtimes) - so your mileage may vary.


> BW
> 
> F
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Federico C. F. Calboli
> Neuroepidemiology and Ageing Research
> Imperial College, St. Mary's Campus
> Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG
> 
> Tel +44 (0)20 75941602   Fax +44 (0)20 75943193
> 
> f.calboli [.a.t] imperial.ac.uk
> f.calboli [.a.t] gmail.com
> 
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