[R-SIG-Mac] macos 26 considerations

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 04/03/2026 01:38, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> Bill,
> 
> on that front, Apple has again been making large breaking changes in Xcode (which they are often slow to fix; with Xcode 26.4 they are going from clang 19 to 21) so I’d definitely avoid going past Xcode 26.3 as that is too risky. That said, I think most of the growing pains in Tahoe have settled (you can pretty much consider x.0 alpha and x.1 beta with most macOS major releases).


AFAIK Xcode/CLT 26.3 was released this week.  That includes Apple clang 
17 based mainly on LLVM 19 (but not for example the same default C++ 
standard which remains C++98).

26.4 is still in beta (and beta 2 fixed some big issues).  That includes 
Apple clang 21 based mainly on LLVM clang 21 (but with some things from 
22). This has default C++14 even though LLVM clang has defaulted to 17 
for some years.

In short, Apple may have caught up with LLVM version numbers, but not 
LLVM versions ....

> 
> Cheers,
> Simon
> 
> 
>> On 4 Mar 2026, at 13:27, Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac using r-project.org> wrote:
>>
>> Gabor,
>>
>> Even with macos 26.2, are you on xcode-14.3 and gfortran-14.2? Or are you working in R-devel and therefore on xcode-14.4?
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> On 2026-02-22 11:47, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 6:25 PM Bill Evans via R-SIG-Mac
>>> <r-sig-mac using r-project.org> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> On 2026-02-22 09:15, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I am 26.2 and everything works fine, no need to reinstall anything,
>>>>> except maybe xquartz, which sometimes needs a reinstall after an
>>>>> update. But xquartz works fine as well.
>>>> Very interesting! I’m curious about the difference in your experience
>>>> and Prof Murdoch’s, perhaps the rgl-dev work is more nuanced than you’ve
>>>> tested in your use of xquartz? I wonder if xorg-server would be any
>>>> better (since it is quite a bit newer) for that.
>>> I don't use rgl or x11, so I indeed only ran `x11(); plot(1:10)` for a
>>> minimal test, and opengl indeed does not seem to work if I try
>>> library(rgl).
>>>
>>> If I just install xorg-server and xinit, then R does not find the X
>>> server when loading the R_X11 dll.
>>>
>>> G.
>> ​
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>>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripleybd using icloud.com
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford