From luke@stat.umn.edu  Wed Feb 25 21:52:34 1998
From: luke@stat.umn.edu (Luke Tierney)
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 15:52:34 -0600 (CST)
Subject: R-beta: Mac version
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.95.980225085929.25647A-100000@chekov> from "Thomas Lumley" at Feb 25, 98 09:04:53 am
Message-ID: <9802252152.AA11595@nokomis.stat.umn.edu>

Thomas Lumley wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, John Bacon-Shone wrote:
> > 
> > While MPW is now free, almost all developers have given up on MPW and
> > Symantec (both have development stopped)and switched to Metrowerks, who
> > have good academic prices and good onward development.
> 
> Metrowerks now has a Win32 version as well, which may make it easier to
> keep the Win and Mac versions in sync. It seems from the box as though you
> get the ability to cross-compile, which might make it easy to keep
> versions in sync.

Cross compiling is possible but I think debugging is a pain - there is
some mechanism but I think it's pretty awkward. I'm actually doing my
Windows stuff in Borland 5.0, but using SoftWindows on a Mac -- that
seems to work nicely if you can live with a 200 MHz Mac running at
about 486/33 speed :-).

I played with Metrowerks CW Pro 1 for Windows a bit and wasn't really
happy with it for my purposes. I use CW Pro 2 on the Mac and am quite
pleased there, but I did not try the new Windows version to see if
some of the issues I'll mention here have been resolved. (I decided to
upgrade my Borland compiler and stick with that.)

In CW Pro 1 for Win I didn't see any way to use a makefile, only the
IDE. Whether you consider that good or bad is up to you. I also could
not get some things to work with DLL's, in particular calling back
into the .EXE file. Both may have been my problem -- it might be
possible but I just didn't figure it out.

Another issue is IEEE compliant handling of comparisons to NaN's. None
of Borland, MS VC++, CW Pro 1, or lcc are compliant. Watcom and
gcc-win32 are (at least with the right compiler flag settings). If R
has code that relies on compliant handling of these comparisons, then
using any of these would be a bad idea.

Just my 2c.

luke


-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Minnesota                      Phone:           612-625-7843
School of Statistics                         Fax:             612-624-8868
206 Church Street                            email:      luke@stat.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA                    WWW:  http://www.stat.umn.edu
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R-beta: Mac version
Luke Tierney