[Rcpp-devel] mixing R's and C++'s RNGs and distributions

Ramon Diaz-Uriarte rdiaz02 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 24 15:07:13 CEST 2015


Hi Matt,

Thanks a lot for the details and the work. That is great! There is a
problem, though: in my particular case, I am uploading my package to
BioConcutor, and there the compiler for Win is 4.6.3 so I am restricted to
that. Including randutils will lead to an error during building the package
in Windows.

Best,

R.

On Wed, 24-06-2015, at 14:55, Matt D. <matdzb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/22/2015 12:31, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:
>> Actually, I just noticed that things will not work if you need your package
>> to run on Windoze: Rtools uses gcc 4.6.3 there, and this will not work with
>> gcc 4.6 (neither in Linux nor Windows) with flag -std=c++0x or
>> -std=gnu++0x. I guess this should be fixable, but I do not know enough to
>> do it.
> Hi again!
>
> I've just tried with the work-in-progress, _experimental_ version 
> available at the following location:
> https://rawgit.com/kevinushey/RToolsToolchainUpdate/master/mingwnotes.html
>
> // In particular, I've used "Windows native compiler for 64 bit Windows 
> output mingw32mingw64_gcc-4.9.2.toolchain.tar.gz".
>
> This works better -- the only missing part is <thread> support :-( 
> However, it is not exactly essential here, in that it's used solely in 
> one place -- to get some extra entropy; that's all.
> After temporarily removing dependence on `std::this_thread::get_id()`, 
> the example -- available at 
> http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/ease-of-use-without-loss-of-power.html 
> -- compiles and runs successfully.
>
> Incidentally,  one can get threads support for MinGW using MSYS2, which 
> gives:
> Thread model: posix
> gcc version 4.9.2 (Rev5, Built by MSYS2 project)
>
> However, the MinGW that comes with Rtools uses the following:
> Thread model: win32
> gcc version 4.9.2 (GCC)
>
> I presume there must be a reason for that. There are certainly 
> trade-offs present: 
> https://wiki.qt.io/MinGW-64-bit#GCC_Threading_model_.28posix_vs_win32.29
> What hits us here is the "no C++11 <thread>, <mutex>, or <future> " 
> ("C11" appears to be a typo) part for the win32 choice.
> // See also: 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17242516/mingw-w64-threads-posix-vs-win32
>
> Note that there's nothing multithreading-specific about the library, so 
> even though I've also tested it with 
> https://github.com/meganz/mingw-std-threads (warning: just something 
> I've ran across while searching for multithreading support for MinGW 
> built w/ win32 threading model, quality and license unknown) and also 
> made it compile & work after a small patch (adding the std::hash 
> specialization), it's probably possible to use another source of entropy 
> here.
>
> I presume another idea would be to use a different GCC version, but 
> that's rather tedious -- 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25455829/using-a-different-gcc-version-from-that-included-with-rtools-with-rcpp-on-window
> Other than the above, I'm wondering myself what's the "official" 
> recommendation for the C++11 threading support w/ Rcpp on Windows.
>
> Best,
>
> Matt

-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25
Facultad de Medicina
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 
Arzobispo Morcillo, 4
28029 Madrid
Spain

Phone: +34-91-497-2412

Email: rdiaz02 at gmail.com
       ramon.diaz at iib.uam.es

http://ligarto.org/rdiaz


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