[Rcpp-devel] Eigen vs Arma -- was: Re: Ceres nonlinear least squares solver

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 May 2012 at 12:41, Steve Lianoglou wrote:
| Hi,
| 
| Swooping in from left field, I just thought I'd comment on the OSX:
| 
| On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote:
| > We will release the Eigen-based lme4 rewrite and if there is no binary
| > package for OS X I plan on pointing at Simon and Brian regarding the
| > Mac OS X binary package creation.  You can build the package for i386
| > OS X even with the old, buggy version of gcc shipped with XCode.  The
| > compiler error reported for the binary package of RcppEigen comes from
| > trying to cross-compile C++ code on a i386 Mac for ppc Macs.  There
| > are many options for avoiding the problem but I haven't been able to
| > interest those involved in creating OS X packages to look at it.
| 
| If you browse the eigen forums, you'll find that the eigen folks
| suggest osx users upgrade their gcc ... it seems that they're not
| interesting in supporting the outdated gcc on osx by default. Here's
| one ref:
| 
| http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=97107&p=204637&hilit=bickson#p204637
| 
| I'm not begrudging anyone for not wanting to support an old gcc or
| anything ... just pointing out that it seems that the eigen folks are
| aware that there are problems w/ it on osx, and don't much care about
| that fact.

Right. I think we knew that, and I recall Doug even mentioned it here a while
back when it first came up. The Eigen folks (not entirely incorrectly) point
to a broken toolchain, rather than forcing themselves to accomodate the
busted old g++ 4.2.1.  

But it is somewhat orthogonal to the CRAN / R world where another set of
people decides which compiler is deemed official.

At the end of day, and to me as a non-user of OS X, this just seems to make
working on OS X as tedious as working on Windows where you have to patch your
system together in bits and bobs.  I guess I am spoiled rotten by 15+ years
of dpkg and apt-get and "things just working". Nicer for development in my
book.
 
| All that having been said, I've actually never had a problem compiling
| RcppEigen on osx (not that I actually use it -- but it compiles --
| just tried it now)

Good to know. Multiarch x86 and x64?

Dirk

-- 
R/Finance 2012 Conference on May 11 and 12, 2012 at UIC in Chicago, IL
See agenda, registration details and more at http://www.RinFinance.com