On Sun, 20 Mar 2011, Berend Hasselman wrote:
On 20-03-2011, at 20:49, Tracy Lightcap wrote:
Simon:
I sent part of your post to Steve Jobs and he wrote back (!). Here's
what he said. Is he still dancing around the issue about gfortran?
I would say yes.
Can Apple guarantee that Intel Fortran and Apple's C compiler coexist and
cooperate flawlessly?
Anyone using R on the Mac and wishing to compile R and/or develop packages with
some Fortran would have to get the Intel Fortran compiler according to Job's
recommendation. If I'm correct, Intel's compiler are not cheap. Most of us
wouldn't want to spend that kind of money.
If and when a transition is necessary, then we'll just have to hope that Simon
finds a way of making gfortran usable in the new setup.
As long as we can use Xcode 3, there shouldn't be a problem.
To be honest, I don't think Apple really cares about things such as R.
The ultimate alternative would be to ditch Mac OS X and change to
something else.
I don't think that is necessary. Provided you have a reasonable C
compiler to start from, you can always build and install your own GNU
toolchain and build R with that. And that is what fink, MacPorts, ...
do, as I understand it. Simon rightly warns that they give you other
things you do not want, but that's not stopping a simple solution.
There are two relevant things which I know of which are special to the
Apple toolchain.
1) Support (or level of support) for Objective C(++). That's not an
issue for R nor for any of the packages: it is for R.app. However,
the latter is compiled separately and 'should' link to a libR.dylib
compiled under a non-Apple toolchain.
2) The ability to make 'fat binaries' by things like
gcc -arch i386 -arch x86_64
and more generally to select the architecture in this way. However,
we hardly use fat binaries in R (only Rscript, AFAIR) and once ppc is
no longer supported, the standard -m32 and -m64 flags will work with
the standard GCC toolchain.
I would be staggered if the task of producing a suitable toolchain for
Mac OS X was 50% of the work needed for Windows. But of course
someone would need to be prepared to do it, and I suspect that the
volume of Mac users of R is less than 10% of that for Windows.
Apologies for the rant but I really do feel that Apple is behaving stupidly and
shortsightedly in this case.
Berend
Tracy
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Jobs <sj...@apple.com>
Date: March 20, 2011 3:29:01 PM EDT
To: "tlight...@lagrange.edu" <tlight...@lagrange.edu>
Subject: Fwd: R and your stance on Fortran
Xcode 4 (and our general evolution away from gcc to clang/LLVM)
does not change the availability of Fortran (or the R programming
language) on the Mac. GNU will continue to distribute GCC (and
gfortran) for the Mac and code generated by that compiler will
continue to integrate with code built with our modern clang/LLVM
tools. (As an aside, our recommended solution for Fortran on the
Mac has long been the Intel Fortran compiler -- it generates much
better performing code than GCC's Fortran).
Sent from my iPad
Begin forwarded message:
Resent-From: sj...@apple.com
From: Tracy Lightcap <tlight...@lagrange.edu>
Date: March 17, 2011 9:38:32 AM PDT
Resent-To: steve+sjo...@apple.com
To: st...@apple.com
Subject: R and your stance on Fortran
Steve:
I use R as my main stats engine, as do a lot of Mac users;
there's even a list serv for Mac R users. Now I read this in one
of the posts there:
As Brian (Ripley, professor of applied statistics, Oxford)
pointed out, R doesn't care. The only annoying part for me as a
Mac binary maintainer is that it means Apple has abandoned the
only branch that supported Fortran back-end, so in the future we
will not be able to provide native Fortran for Xcode. This has
been known for a while and Apple's stance is that they don't care
about Fortran, so in some (but not immediate) future we may be
back to the mess of mixing compilers.
Note that LLVM and clang don't really have any real benefits for
the R users so far. Tests suggest that they make some parts
slower and we could not measure any overall benefit (unlike let's
say on arm), so people were not rushing to llvm/clang so far.
Apple's move to llvm/clang is really based on a political
decision, not a technical one. The only benefit I see so far is
what Brian mentioned as well that some people will have to
realize that gcc is not the standard and can test on other
compilers to find their bugs.
Cheers,
Simon (Urbanek, statistics research, AT&T Labs)
Is it really true that Apple, a company that is alive today
largely due to its inroads in education, is willing to put the
distribution of the most rapidly growing statistics engine used
by academics in jeopardy because "∑ Apple's stance is that they
don't care about Fortran ∑"? R has recently been adopted as the
official language by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political
and Social Research at the University of Michigan, the biggest
trainer of social science grad students in the country. It is
being adopted by universities and colleges, governments, and
research institutions at a staggering pace (the price is right,
you know). That the use of this extremely useful and powerful
application on the Macs in education should be put at risk by a
simple reluctance to not accommodate Fortran is not just unwise;
it's just plain silly.
Is Simon right? If he is, fix it. Now.
Tracy Lightcap
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
LaGrange College
601 Broad St.
LaGrange GA 30240-2999
(O) tlight...@lagrange.edu (H) altl...@mindspring.com
706.880.8226
www.lagrange.edu/academics/political-science/faculty/tlightcap.aspx
Tracy Lightcap
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
LaGrange College
601 Broad St.
LaGrange GA 30240-2999
(O) tlight...@lagrange.edu (H) altl...@mindspring.com
706.880.8226
www.lagrange.edu/academics/political-science/faculty/tlightcap.aspx
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--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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