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

[Dominick Samperi]

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
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