From p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk  Mon Apr 20 18:48:42 1998
From: p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk (Peter Dalgaard BSA)
Date: 20 Apr 1998 19:48:42 +0200
Subject: R-0.61.1 compiled with egcs-mingw32
In-Reply-To: guido@sirio.stat.unipd.it's message of Sun, 22 Mar 1998 18:59:19 +0100 (GMT+0100)
References: <19980322175919.1333.qmail@sirio.stat.unipd.it>
Message-ID: <x24szo2xl1.fsf@blueberry.kubism.ku.dk>

guido@sirio.stat.unipd.it writes:

> rgnwbin.tgz and rgnwsrc.tgz are the first results of an attempt to
> build R for Win95 and WinNT using egcs-mingw32.
> 
> The advantages over the binaries for MsWindows that can be found in CRAN
> are:
> 1. R seems to run faster. Some simple (perhaps too simple)
>    benchmarks point to a 20% gain.
> 2. The port is based on a more recent version (0.61.1) and it is more
>    complete (more "system calls": system, tempfile, unlink, 
>    WinExec - to launch applications without waiting for the result;
>    support for the standard help system: try help(), help(abline),
>    help(line,eda), ?women, data(), library())
> 3. A new menu item "Stop current computation" make  possible 
>    to interupt long computation (but only when  something is printed).
> 4. Since egcs-mingw32 uses the standard C calling convention, 
>    you don't need a Watcom compiler to build dynamic link libraries.
>    Indeed, this was my original motivation.
> 5. It should be easy to use some other gnu-win32 compilers (maybe
>    running on a non MsWindows machine). It should be easy to 
>    adapt the port to lcc-win32, too.


One piece of bad news is that it doesn't work on Win3.X systems
(win32s). The PE-COFF object files that mingw32 makes simply won't
load, even for a "Hello, world" example.

The most likely candidate to get something running on that platform
(I, for one, still have quite a few students with older notebooks
and/or upgrade paranoia) seems to be RSXNT, but it's not all that
simple. It's also GCC-based, but the "specs" file is set up
differently from the mingw32/egcs one, which may create a great deal
of "fun".

RSXNT can (e.g.) be found at
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/dpmigcc/

I did a quick test and it does seem that a little fiddling makes it
possible to compile e.g. wincons.c with mingw32 headers plus a few
extra defines from the mingw32 specs file, so it would seem to be
doable, but it's hardly trivial. (Actually, this was with the ordinary
Linux GCC, but it's the header files that always cause trouble).

I also haven't got the foggiest about how to create DLL's with RSXNT,
especially how to to the important callbacks to the R binary (call_R). 

And, there's no g77 in RSXNT, so you'd need f2c. Perhaps it would be
easier to make the egcs cross-platform tools once and for all?

In any case, we need to do an "official" collection of tools. I tried
to compile using Guido's files during Easter, but immediately got
stopped by the absence of an "ls" command... 


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

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R-0.61.1 compiled with egcs-mingw32
Peter Dalgaard BSA