On Aug 24, 2005, at 4:58 PM, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:

> On Aug 24, 2005, at 11:09 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>> I just repeat what I've said here already: unless you desperately
>> need 64-bit R there is no real benefit from using gcc4, because it's
>> still very instable (gfortran segfaults even on simple examples) and
>> unreliable (gfortran is even slower than g77). There is a good reason
>> why the CRAN build uses gcc3 and g77.
>
> That was a nice clear statement. So given that I want to compile R  
> from source (because I need the devel version), without too much  
> hassle I should use gcc 3.3 supplied by Xcode 2.1. But what do I do  
> with respect to the Fortran compiler?

CRAN installer package of R comes with g77 3.4 which is recommended.  
You can install it even separately from the R binary (preferably  
using sudo installer ... because there is a bug in the package that  
doesn't allow non-admins to install it - c.f. the list). That version  
is tested to work with the gcc3 that cones with Xcode 2.x. If you  
plan to compile R from sources you may also want to run
sudo gcc_select 3.3
to prevent having problems with cc_dynamic.

> How close should the versions match? Should I get
>   - gcc 3.3.6 (latest version of the 3.3 branch) from Gnu's website
>   - gcc 3.4.4 from Gnu's website
>   - gcc 3.4 from the hpc.sourceforge website

It doesn't really matter as long as it is >=3.3 and <=3.9 except that  
it should use static Fortran libraries if possible (unfortunately the  
more recent ones don't).

Cheers,
Simon


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