[R-SIG-Mac] Mac OS R/Rcpp/Octave/LLVM/clang/g++ issues

[Simon Urbanek]

Dominick,

you may want to follow recent thread on Mavericks here - it discussed the ABI incompatibility of gcc and clang as well as the tools options.

Cheers,
Simon


On Oct 30, 2013, at 11:12 PM, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> The following strange behavior under Mac OS was distilled from
> attempts to resolve problems with the RcppOctave package, but
> the problem will be illustrated without use of this package.
> 
> Basically, when I try to mix use of the Octave library with
> Rcpp, there is a memory exception when the Mac dlopen() is used to
> open Rcpp.so (the error occurs in loadLibrary()). To reproduce,
> simply drop the two attached files (Makevars and strtest.cpp) into
> Rcpp/src. Then 'R CMD INSTALL Rcpp' will fail with a memory problem,
> at least sometimes…
> 
> I say "sometimes" because this problem did not occur before I
> reinstalled Mac OS X 10.8 (because the update to Mavericks
> failed). On the other hand, it did occur before the update when I
> tried to use an older version of Octave (installed by MacPorts).
> For this test the latest version of Octave (3.6.4) was installed
> using homebrew.
> 
> Note that the trivial source file strtest.cpp defines one function
> that is not actually called! Just instantiating the Octave
> class string_vector is enough to trigger the problem. If the
> line using string_vector is commented out there is no problem.
> It may also not occur if you have older software installed?
> 
> After the OS reinstall, and after installing the latest version of the
> command line tools, there is no llvm-gcc-4.2 and llvm-g++-4.2
> like there was previously?
> 
> The problem is clearly related to how templates are instantiated
> (or not instantiated) when using clang++ or g++, possibly a version
> mismatch, or some Mac OS environmental issue that I have not
> been able to isolate. Static initialization may also be a factor.
> 
> The last post in this link seems to address a related issue...
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/pocl/+bug/1005329
> 
> This messy problem raises the question: what is in store
> for R under Mac OS X going forward? Apple is dropping support
> for gfortran, and even for gcc/g++, so will clang/clang++ be
> used? What about Fortran? DragonEgg?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dominick
> 
> <Makevars><strtest.cpp>_______________________________________________
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