[R-SIG-Mac] Using sanitizers in MacOS builds

[Duncan Murdoch]

Thanks.  With any luck, these will show my error, and I can make some 
progress.

Duncan Murdoch

On 2025-12-10 7:29 a.m., Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On 10/12/2025 11:13, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> I am making some large changes to rgl, and something I've done is
>> causing crashes which I'm having trouble tracking down.  These are
>> likely things that one of the sanitizers could detect, so I'd like to do
>> a build using one.
>>
>> The WRE manual gives partial instructions about how to enable them.  It
>> first says to put these lines in ~/.R/Makevars:
>>
>>     CC = gcc -std=gnu99 -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer
>>     CXX = g++ -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer
>>     FC = gfortran -fsanitize=address
> 
> Not for macOS ....
> 
>> These don't work for me on my Mac, generating lots of compile errors
>> that I don't see with the default settings.
>>
>> Later WRE gives other instructions for clang 18.  What's not clear to me
>> is what I should do for the default compiler tools (including clang 16)
>> from mac.r-project.org.  Can anyone suggest what I should do for this
>> situation:
>>
>>    - using the default build of R from CRAN
> 
> AFAIK you need to build R with sanitizers: it might be possible without
> but the issues often are partially in the way the package calls back into R.
> 
>>    - using the libs and tools from mac.r-project.org
> 
> In principle this might needs libs built against the sanitizers but I
> have only seen one instance over the years.  Normally you will get less
> (but still useful) information.
> 
> Anything built with sanitizers needs to be of the same compiler version
> as used for R (in Linux experience, even the same patch version).
> 
>>    - trying to build rgl with the sanitizer options
> 
> See
> 
> https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/M1-SAN/README.txt
> 
> which is tested daily, but only with up-to-date macOS and tools.
> 
> I don't think the gfortran used on macOS has sanitizer support, but it
> any case GCC's is not compatible with LLVM's.  So this is C/C++ only.
>