This document is written as a tutorial intended to be read from the beginning until reaching the point with the required information. Users only needing to build existing packages from source will need to read only the first two sections.
MikTeX (with basic packages and inconsolata) is needed to build package vignettes and documentation. Inno Setup is needed to build the R installer.
Not needed for the “recommended” packages, but some other contributed CRAN R packages may require additional external software to install or for the checks (more below).
R and packages are built using Rtools, which is a collection of build tools, a compiler toolchain, headers and pre-compiled static libraries.
R 4.4 uses Rtools44, where the build tools are from Msys2 and QPDF. The compiler toolchain, headers and pre-compiled static libraries are built using MXE. Rtools44 is available via a standalone offline installer which contains all of these components and is available from here, as a file named like rtools44-6094-6039.exe, where 6094-6039 are version numbers.
The installer has currently around 450MB in size and about 3GB will be used after installation. It includes libraries needed by almost all CRAN packages, so that such libraries don’t have to and shouldn’t be downloaded from external sources (the CRAN Repository Policy has details on requirements on CRAN).
The advantage is that this way it is easy to ensure that the toolchain and the libraries are always compatible, and to upgrade the toolchain and all libraries together.
It is recommended to use the defaults and install into c:/rtools44. When done that way, Rtools44 may be used in the same R session which installed it or which was started before Rtools44 was installed.
From the user perspective, Rtools44 is not different from Rtools43, it only has newer version of compilers and other software. The only big difference is that in addition to the version for 64-bit Intel processors, there is also a version for 64-bit ARM processors. Both versions work the same way from the user’s perspective, the key difference is that they use different compiler toolchains (GCC with binutils vs LLVM) and indeed the distribution file names are different.
Rtools44 (for Intel) is best tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2022. It is sometimes tested on Windows 11 and expected to work there well because of Windows backward compatibility. Rtools 4.4 might also work on older systems, but it is minimally tested: Rtools 4.4 was tested before the release of R 4.4.0 and could build R from source also on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. However, Msys2 officially does not support Windows 7 anymore: the build tools may not work properly. Some important libraries included in Rtools 4.4, including ICU, require at least Windows 7, and hence code built by Rtools 4.4 cannot be expected to work reliably on Windows older than 7.
Rtools44 for ARM is only tested on Windows 11. Windows 10 is not supported: while it already had support for 64-bit ARM CPUs, it could not run 64-bit Intel binaries, which are used in Rtools. So far, the testing of Rtools for ARM has been limited and the LLVM (flang-new) Fortran compiler is still not stable enough to compile some presumably valid Fortran code in CRAN packages. Also, some features are not supported (e.g. MPI). However, Rtools for ARM should already allow package authors of most packages to test their code and adapt it to work on the platform. Rtools for ARM can only be installed on a 64-bit ARM machine. Rtools for Intel can also be installed on a 64-bit Intel machine and can coexist with the version for ARM.
One only needs to install the R build (via the installer) and Rtools44 (as described above), in either order.
No further set up is needed to e.g.:
install.packages("PKI", type="source")which will build from source PKI and its dependency base64enc.
As a harder and longer test, let’s try installing RcppCWB from github.
First, install devtools (accept to build packages from source when offered, but most needed packages will be installed as binary):
install.packages(devtools)And then install RcppCWB from github as source:
devtools::install_github("PolMine/RcppCWB")Finally, let’s check installing package tiff:
download.packages("tiff", destdir=".")
tools::Rcmd("check tiff_0.1-11.tar.gz") # update file name as neededOne can run the package check also from command-line, e.g. cmd.exe, as usual. No setting of PATH is necessary, Rtools44 will be found automatically by R.
R since version 4.2 on Windows uses UCRT as the C runtime and all native code is built for this runtime. It is not possible to use static libraries compiled by Rtools40 and earlier, which were built for MSVCRT, an older C runtime for Windows. UCRT allows UTF-8 to be used as the native encoding.
One may run the Msys2 shell (“Rtools bash” from the startup menu, or run c:/rtools44/msys2.exe and run R from there). One may also install additional Msys2 software using pacman, e.g. additional build tools.
Run the Msys2 shell, update the Msys2 part and install two more package:
pacman -Syuu
pacman -Sy wget subversionThese pacman commands may also be useful:
Install an index of available files using pacman -Fy and then get e.g. a package providing file unzip.exe by pacman -F unzip.exe.
List all available packages (not necessarily installed) using pacman -Sl. List installed packages using pacman -Q.
One should only be installing packages from “msys” sub-repository of Msys2, mixing other sub-repositories with the toolchain may cause trouble.
Like earlier versions of Rtools, but unlike Msys2 default, the home directory in bash is the user profile (e.g. C:\Users\username).
As a next step to install R from source, download and unpack the Tcl/Tk bundle from here, a file named such as tcltk-6094-5412.zip, then download the R sources.
TCLBUNDLE=tcltk-6094-5412.zip
wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/$TCLBUNDLE
svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-4-4-branch
cd R-4-4-branch
unzip ../$TCLBUNDLE
cd src/gnuwin32The corresponding version of the bundle for ARM would be named tcltk-6094-5412-aarch64.zip.
To automatically download always the current/latest version of the Tcl bundle, one can do e.g. this:
wget -np -nd -r -l1 -A 'tcltk-*.zip' https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/And a similar trick can be used to obtain other files that always exist but have changing version names.
Set environment variables as follows (update the MiKTeX installation directory in the commands below if needed, this one is “non-standard” from an automated installation described later below):
export PATH=/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin:$PATH
export PATH=/c/Program\ Files/MiKTeX/miktex/bin/x64:$PATH
export TAR="/usr/bin/tar"
export TAR_OPTIONS="--force-local"On ARM, the corresponding bin directory for the toolchain would be aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin (instead of x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin).
Test that the tools are available by running
which make gcc pdflatex tarNote: GNU tar, which is part of Rtools44, does not work with colons used in drive letters on Windows paths, because it instead uses colons when specifying non-local archives. By adding --force-local to TAR_OPTIONS, this is disabled and colons work for drive letters. One can, instead, use the Windows tar (a variant of BSD tar) on Windows 10 and newer, e.g. /c/Windows/System32/tar, but several CRAN packages rely on GNU tar features particularly during installation. Rtools40 and earlier used a customized version of GNU tar, which did not need the --force-local options for drive letters to work.
MkRules.rules expects Inno Setup in C:/Program Files (x86)/Inno Setup 6. If you have installed it into a different directory, specify it in MkRules.local, as shown here:
cat <<EOF >MkRules.local
ISDIR = C:/Program Files (x86)/InnoSetup
EOFOn ARM, add these two additional lines to MkRules.local:
USE_LLVM = 1
WIN =Build R and the recommended packages:
make rsync-recommended
make all recommendedWhen the build succeeds, one can run R via ../../bin/R.
To build the installer, run make distribution, it will appear as installer/R-*-win.exe. Note, that while one may use parallel make via -j for all and recommended, intermittent problems have been seen while building the manual, so the build may fail and one may have to finish with a serial build. Parallel make is not useful for distribution, because of issues with building the manual in parallel.
To build R with debug symbols, set export DEBUG=T in the terminal before the build (and possibly add `EOPTS = -O0" to MkRules.local to disable compiler optimizations, hence obtaining more reliable debug information).
Please note that when Rtools44 is uninstalled, one loses also the Msys2 packages installed there in addition to the default set (or any other possibly accidentally added files to the installation directory, so to c:\rtools44 by default). On ARM, the default is c:\rtools44-aarch64.
Instead of installing Rtools44 (via the installer), one might use a standalone installation of Msys2 and use the toolchain from the tarball (as described later in the text).
Also, one may upgrade the Msys2 part of Rtools44 by pacman:
pacman -SyuuThe toolchain and libraries in Rtools44 can be upgraded from the Rtools44 Msys2 bash. The toolchain and libraries are inside /x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix (which corresponds to c:\rtools44\x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix outside the shell).
To find what is the current installed version, run
cat /x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/.versionYou will get a single number, such as 6094, which corresponds to the number in the toolchain tarball name, e.g. rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst. So all that is needed is to delete the directory, download the current full toolchain tarball from here and extract it. This can be done from the shell using commands like
cd /
wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
rm -rf /x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix
tar xf rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
rm rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zstAfter upgrading, it is recommended to update also the version number in .version.
In Rtools44, this version is also stored in the Windows registry and is displayed in Add/Remove Programs menu and used by some tools, including winget (see the output of winget list). To display the stored version number from the cmd.exe command line, run
reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Rtools44_is1 /v DisplayVersion
reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Rtools44_is1 /v DisplayName(in a non-standard installation of Rtools44, the information may be stored elsewhere, e.g. in an installation for the current user only, it would be under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKLM)
For Rtools44, the version would be prefixed by 4.4., so it would be something like 4.4.6094 and the name would be something like Rtools 4.4 (6094-6039). The second number, 6039 in the example, is the version of scripts used to build the Rtools44 installer.
To update the version information after upgrading Rtools44 toolchain and libraries manually to version 6094, run (keep 6039 alone as this is not related to the installer):
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Rtools44_is1 /v DisplayVersion /d 4.4.6094 /f
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Rtools44_is1 /v DisplayName /d "Rtools 4.4 (6094-6039)" /fThe version of Rtools44 for ARM is from the Windows viewpoint a different application and can coexist with an installation of Rtools for Intel. The ARM version installs by default into c:\rtools44-aarch64, the toolchain and libraries are in aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix, the registry key is Rtools44-aarch64_is1 and the display name is e.g. Rtools 4.4 (6094-6039-aarch64). The corresponding toolchain bundle name is rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-aarch64-6094.tar.zst. The commands above thus have to be updated accordingly.
For reference, one may find out exactly how a given version of the toolchain was built by checking out
svn checkout -r 6094 https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/toolchain_libs/mxe/The version numbers, download URLs for the sources, and build configurations are under “src” (not all of those packages are part of the toolchain). So e.g. to find out how tiff was built, one may run
svn cat -r 6094 https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/toolchain_libs/mxe/src/tiff.mkThis is one way to quickly find out if an upgrade would provide a newer version of a specific library.
An upgrade “to fix things, without knowing for sure it will help” may be useful when one is building someone else’s source packages (so not from CRAN, where binary packages are provided, but say from github) and the package doesn’t build due to say linking errors, but it builds correctly somewhere else (say via github actions on the package github page). One might also try on Winbuilder. When such package is building on Winbuilder or via github actions fine, but locally has linking errors, it may be that an upgrade could help.
In other cases, a package author working on their own package would probably know for sure that an upgrade is needed, e.g. when local installation of Rtools44 does not have a library which was however already added to Rtools44. Upgrading in other cases would likely be a waste of time and resources.
Package authors may prefer to have both Rtools43 and Rtools44 (or possibly Rtools42 or Rtools40) installed in their system. This is possible, these are treated as different applications by Windows and are installed in different directories (by default c:\rtools43 and c:\rtools44). It means one would have duplicate installations of Msys2 (which are included in both), so there would be different sets of Msys2 packages and different versions in the two corresponding “Rtools” Msys2 shells. The home directory as perceived by the shells will be the same (the user profile), which may be a good thing, yet, there are potential issues with configurations of some of the tools, if they have different versions. That would be easiest to solve by upgrading the Msys2 packages in both installations of Rtools.
Care must be taken not to mix multiple installations of Msys2 environments. To reduce the risk, it is recommended to refrain from including an Msys2 installation to user/system PATH.
One needs to be careful with third party tools for installing software on Windows, such as winget, when using multiple installations of Rtools: these tools may offer to upgrade say Rtools43 by Rtools44, which would not be desirable in such case.
R version 4.1 and 4.0 would automatically use Rtools40 as documented for those versions (with the necessity to put the build tools on PATH, as documented). R 4.2 automatically uses Rtools42, R 4.3 automatically uses Rtools43, and R 4.4 automatically uses Rtools44.
Note that mixing build tools from different versions of Msys2 may not work due to incompatibilities in the Cygwin/Msys runtime in those versions (this is also the case of Git for Windows). It is not a good idea to put tools from different versions on PATH, nor to use Msys2 bash tools from a different installation.
However, the toolchain and libraries themselves (c:\rtools44\x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix in Rtools44, c:\rtools43\x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix in Rtools43, c:\rtools42\x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix in Rtools42 or c:\rtools40\mingw64 in Rtools40) do not link to the Cygwin/Msys runtime and hence can be used from an external Msys2 installation. Please note that the delineation of what is a build tool and what is inside the toolchain and libraries part is not always clear and may change over time, depending on how it is easiest to build the tool, but, nothing from x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix needs the Cygwin/Msys runtime.
The ARM and Intel version of Rtools44 may be installed on the same 64-bit ARM machine. The Intel version would be used with an Intel version of R (running in emulator on the machine, but that is done automatically by the OS) and the ARM version would be used with an ARM version of R.
Alternatively to Rtools44 install from the installer, one may use custom build tools (e.g. a standalone version of Msys2) with a “toolchain tarball” consisting only of the compiler toolchain, headers and pre-compiled static libraries. This is useful for server and expert use.
The “base” version of the toolchain tarball contains the compiler toolchain and libraries needed to build R itself, including the recommended packages, but it is enough for most CRAN packages. The “full” version contains libraries for almost all CRAN packages.
The tarballs do not include Msys2. One instead needs to have a separate installation of the required build tools, typically a standalone installation of Msys2. This text assumes a standalone Msys2 installation at least with packages unzip diffutils make winpty rsync texinfo tar texinfo-tex zip subversion bison moreutils xz patch.
The tarballs are more flexible in that one does not need to always install Msys2 nor the full set of libraries. Also, tarballs are compressed using the Zstandard compressor, which works better for this content than the compressor used by Rtools44 (InnoSetup does not support Zstandard as of this writing), so the compressed file is smaller and decompresses faster.
One can also use a single Msys2 installation with the build tools for both Intel and ARM tarballs (on an ARM machine).
The script below automatically installs Msys2, MiKTeX, Inno Setup and 64-bit Ghostscript (the last three into non-standard directories) and can be used on fresh systems or virtual machines or containers without previous installation of this software. It could also be used as an inspiration for installing on real systems, but one should review it first or run selected lines manually, to prevent damage to the existing installations:
cd \
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/r/setup.ps1 -OutFile setup.ps1 -UseBasicParsing
PowerShell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File setup.ps1One may also want to clean up after the script (temp can be deleted).
Additional software is needed by some contributed CRAN packages, including Pandoc, 32-bit Ghostscript, JDK, JAGS, MSMPI, PhantomJS, Python, Git, Ruby and Rust executables. A script is available to install these automatically on a new system, following the setup.ps1 script mentioned earlier. These scripts are regularly used in a setup for testing newer versions of Rtools (named “ucrt3”) currently based on Rtools44, but with pre-downloaded installers, so it may be necessary to update them for newer versions when the older installers become inaccessible.
On 64-bit ARM machines, the scripts install 64-bit ARM builds of the software when available (currently only Python), otherwise they install the 64-bit Intel builds. However, it is not possible to link Intel DLLs to an ARM executable, so DLLs from 64-bit Intel builds cannot be used.
This section assumes that R has been installed from its binary installer.
First, download the toolchain and libraries. They are available in a single tarball here, a file named such as rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst (6094 is the version number). The “base” toolchain is named rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-6094.tar.zst. The corresponding versions for ARM would be named rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-aarch64-6094.tar.zst and rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-aarch64-6094.tar.zst
You may run an Msys2 shell C:\msys64\msys2.exe and the following commands (please note the number 6094 in this example needs to be replaced by the current release available, there is always only one at a time):
mkdir ucrt3
cd ucrt3
wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
tar xf rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
export R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_SOFT=`pwd`/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix
export R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_PATH=`pwd`/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin:/usr/bin
export PATH=/c/Program\ Files/MiKTeX/miktex/bin/x64:$PATH
export TAR="/usr/bin/tar"
export TAR_OPTIONS="--force-local"The corresponding version of the tarball for ARM would be named rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-aarch64-6094.tar.zst and the corresponding location of the toolchain is aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix.
To make the use of Rtools44 simpler, when R is installed via the binary installer it by default uses Rtools44 for the compilers and libraries. PATH will be set by R (inside front-ends like RGui and RTerm, but also R CMD) to include the build tools (e.g. make) and the compilers (e.g. gcc). In addition, R installed via the binary installer will automatically set R_TOOLS_SOFT (and LOCAL_SOFT for backwards compatibility) to the Rtools44 location for building R packages. This feature is only present in the installer builds of R, not when R is installed from source. R for Intel will automatically use Rtools44 for Intel and R for ARM would automatically use Rtools44 for ARM.
Now we are building packages using a custom installation of the toolchain (the toolchain tarball) at an arbitrary location, and we use R installed from the binary installer, and hence as shown above we set R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_PATH and R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_SOFT. R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_PATH will be prepended to PATH instead of the Rtools44 directories. R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_SOFT value will be used as R_TOOLS_SOFT (and LOCAL_SOFT) instead of the Rtools44 soft directory. See below in this text for discussion re LOCAL_SOFT.
This is not needed when installing R from source and building R packages using that installation. In such case, the build tools and compilers already have to be on PATH, and R uses by default R_TOOLS_SOFT (and LOCAL_SOFT) derived from that. See below in this text for discussion re LOCAL_SOFT.
One wouldn’t have to add /usr/bin to R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_PATH when running in a standard installation of Msys2, but it is done here for instructional purposes and may be useful in more complicated setups where a mix of tools may be on PATH, such as in github actions (but note the problems with incompatible Cygwin/Msys runtimes mentioned above).
Note in the above example that the compiler toolchain does not have to be on PATH itself, but it would do no harm if it were.
Now run R from the same terminal by /c/Program\ Files/R/R-4.4.0/bin/R. Try installing “PKI”: install.packages("PKI", type="source").
This will build from source PKI and its dependency base64enc.
Examples in this document use Msys2 with mintty and bash, which is the default with Msys2 and is perhaps easier to use with building/testing for those familiar with Unix. One can, however, also use cmd.exe, with the benefit of nicer fonts and more reliable line editing (mintty uses a different interface to communicate with RTerm).
Download and unpack Tcl/Tk bundle from here, a file named such as tcltk-6094-5412.zip. Do this in the Msys2 shell (please note that the numbers 6094 and 5412 need to be replaced by the current ones).
TCLBUNDLE=tcltk-6094-5412.zip
wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/$TCLBUNDLE
svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-4-4-branch
cd R-4-4-branch
unzip ../$TCLBUNDLE
cd src/gnuwin32The corresponding version of the bundle for ARM would be named tcltk-6094-5412-aarch64.zip.
Set environment variables. Note that when building R, one needs to have the compiler toolchain on PATH, it is not added automatically in this case (adjust below if the toolchain tarball was unpacked in a different directory). The R_CUSTOM_TOOLS_SOFT and R_CUSTOM_TOOL_PATH variables are not needed when buillding R from source, but setting them would do no harm:
export PATH=/c/my_toolchain_location/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin
export PATH=/c/Program\ Files/MiKTeX/miktex/bin/x64:$PATH
export TAR="/usr/bin/tar"
export TAR_OPTIONS="--force-local"The corresponding location of the toolchain for ARM is aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix.
Test that the tools are available by running (set variables like for building R packages, as shown above):
which make gcc pdflatex tarOn ARM, one could test also which clang flang.
MkRules.rules expects Inno Setup in C:/Program Files (x86)/Inno Setup 6. If you have installed it into a different directory (such as by the automated script above), specify it in MkRules.local:
cat <<EOF >MkRules.local
ISDIR = C:/Program Files (x86)/InnoSetup
EOFOn ARM, add these two additional lines to MkRules.local:
USE_LLVM = 1
WIN =Build R and recommended packages:
make rsync-recommended
make all recommendedWhen the build succeeds, one can run R via ../../bin/R.
To build the installer, run make distribution, it will appear in installer/R-*.exe.
To build R with debug symbols, set export DEBUG=T in the terminal before the build (and possibly add `EOPTS = -O0" to MkRules.local to disable compiler optimizations, hence obtaining reliable debug information).
Github default runners for github actions include Windows Server 2022, which has support for UTF-8 as native encoding and has pre-installed build tools. It is thus convenient to install only the toolchain tarball there, packaged using Zstandard compression (smaller, faster to decompress).
For packages that only need libraries from the “base” toolchain, it is better to use that, saving more time and bandwidth. The actions should download the toolchain from github, not from CRAN servers.
R itself can be installed from the binary installer and cached. Caching the toolchain itself is not helpful: the default compression currently used for that is much less efficient than Zstandard, so using the cache checking takes longer and requires more resources.
An experiment has been carried out using codetools (a package without dependencies and not needing compilation) and using tiff (a package needed compilation and depending on two more packages).
With tiff, checking with a missing toolchain (which fails) took over 1 minute. Checking with the base toolchain took nearly 2 minutes (and passed, it is enough for the involved packages). Checking with the full toolchain took 3 minutes (note: the timings are expected to vary based on internal github setup). More information is available here, based on “ucrt3”, so the experimental builds of Rtools, but one finds among the experimental builds also those that became Rtools releases.
Users of github actions are advised to read the section about pkg-config, with a description of caveats seen on github action runners.
At the time of this writing, github action runners did not support 64-bit ARM Windows machines. Once they become available, they should be usable for checking packages in a similar way.
As with previous versions of R and Rtools, the Winbuilder service can be used for building and checking packages on Windows, with the same setup that is used for CRAN incomming checks and CRAN binary package builds, with all CRAN and Bioconductor packages available for checking.
Additional checking services are available including R-hub.
Neither Winbuilder nor R-hub support the 64-bit ARM Windows machines at the time of this writing.
At the time of this writing, the best readily available option is probably to run Windows 11 in a virtual machine on Apple Silicon hardware (tested with UTM/QEMU, but should work also with other virtualization software). This is likely to change in the near future.
Rtools since Rtools42 is itself cross-compiled and Rtools44 includes cross-compilers which run on Linux/x86-64. It should be possible to test building of R packages this way and to see problems already visible at compilation time (though it is not normally done).
Issues specific to LLVM/clang would be easily found by testing on other platforms, unless in Windows-specific code.
R is built and distributed without debug symbols, so the first step should be building R from source including debug symbols. It is recommended to build R without compiler optimizations (-O0) to make sure the debug symbols are precise (and only fall back to default optimizations if necessary to reproduce the problem at hand).
It is better not to build the R installer, but use R for debugging from the build tree, so that the sources are readily available for modification and also for the debugger (otherwise one would have to instruct the debugger where to find the sources; directory is the command for gdb). See the previous sections on building R from source. Also, building the installer takes much longer.
When R is built with debug symbols this way, R packages installed by it from source will also have debug symbols. For debugging, it may be convenient to install the package from a directory, rather than a tarball, e.g.
tar xf PKI_0.1-11.tar.gz
../../bin/R CMD INSTALL PKITo use gdb as the debugger (when on Intel machines, see below for notes for an ARM machine), one may install it using pacman in Rtools44 (and hence Msys2) as follows:
pacman -Syuu
pacman -Sy gdbLets say we want to debug PKI R function PKI.genRSAkey which is implemented in C in PKI_RSAkeygen. We will need two Rtools44 (Msys2) shell windows.
In the first window, run R, load the PKI package (DLL) and find out the process ID:
$ ../../bin/R
> library(PKI)
Loading required package: base64enc
> Sys.getpid()
[1] 11860In the second window, run gdb, attach to the R process, set a break-point on the PKI_RSAkeygen function and let the R process continue:
$ gdb
(gdb) attach 11860
Attaching to process 11860
(gdb) b PKI_RSAkeygen
Breakpoint 1 at 0x7ffd06226491: file pki-x509.c, line 629.
(gdb) c
Continuing.Now, in the first window, run the R function to debug:
key <- PKI::PKI.genRSAkey(bits = 512L)In the second window, the debugger will give a prompt to debug the C function:
Thread 1 hit Breakpoint 1, PKI_RSAkeygen (sBits=0x21fdea4b2a8) at pki-x509.c:629
629 int bits = asInteger(sBits);
(gdb)For more, please refer to GDB documentation. Useful commands are p (print value of a variable), c (continue executing), n (execute one step not interrupting inside called functions), s (execute one step interrupting inside called functions), bt (print C stacktrace). One can also use p to call some functions defined in R, e.g. to print R stacktrace (in the R window):
(gdb) p Rf_printwhere()And to print an R value (SEXP):
(gdb) p Rf_PrintValue()or to modify value of a variable.
Please note that interrupting R execution to enter the debugger by pressing Ctrl-C does not work reliably, hence attaching to the R process is preferred. Also please note that one cannot reliably place the breakpoint before the DLL is loaded (pending breakpoints don’t work).
But, one can instruct R to enter the debugger prompt (break into it) if running inside a debugger. Rgui has this feature. Run Rgui in gdb:
gdb ../../bin/x64/Rgui.exe
(gdb) rAnd once Rgui opens up, load the package:
library(PKI)and then resize the Rgui window to see also the gdb window and choose Misc/Break to debugger from the Rgui menu. That way you will get into gdb prompt in the terminal window from which you have run Rgui, and continue as in the previous example.
On an ARM machine, install the package without staged installation:
tar xf PKI_0.1-12.tar.gz
../../bin/R CMD INSTALL --no-staged-install PKI Install the LLVM lldb debugger:
pacman -Syuu
pacman -Sy mingw-w64-clang-aarch64-lldbRun the debugger:
/clangarm64/bin/lldbRun these commands to attach to the R process, set the breakpoint and let the R process continue:
(lldb) attach 13608
Process 13608 stoppedxing DWARF for R.dll...
* thread #3, stop reason = Exception 0x80000003 encountered at address 0x7ffb77535370
frame #0: 0x00007ffb77535374 ntdll.dll`DbgBreakPoint + 4
ntdll.dll`DbgBreakPoint:
-> 0x7ffb77535374 <+4>: ret
0x7ffb77535378 <+8>: udf #0x0
0x7ffb7753537c <+12>: udf #0x0
0x7ffb77535380 <+16>: mov x3, x2
Executable module set to "E:\msys64\home\tomas\trunk2\bin\Rterm.exe".
Architecture set to: aarch64-pc-windows-gnu.
(lldb) b PKI_RSAkeygen
Breakpoint 1: where = PKI.dll`PKI_RSAkeygen + 8 at pki-x509.c:631:16, address = 0x00007ffb31ee553c
(lldb) c
Process 13608 resumingAfter entering the command as above to the R window, the lldb debugger gives the prompt:
Process 13608 stopped
* thread #1, stop reason = breakpoint 1.1
frame #0: 0x00007ffb31ee553c PKI.dll`PKI_RSAkeygen(sBits=0x00000211d781e810) at pki-x509.c:631:16
628 SEXP PKI_RSAkeygen(SEXP sBits) {
629 EVP_PKEY *key;
630 RSA *rsa;
-> 631 int bits = asInteger(sBits);
632 if (bits < 512)
633 Rf_error("invalid key size");
634 PKI_init();
(lldb)LLDB commands are sometimes similar to GDB, but not always the same. There is a GDB to LLDB command map for GDB users.
Note also that on ARM, R directory layout is sligthly different. RGui and RTerm are installed directly under bin as bin/Rgui.exe and bin/Rterm.exe. On Intel, for historical reasons, it is as bin/x64/Rgui.exe and bin/x64/Rterm.exe.
It is recommended to perform C code modifications (adding debug messages, checks, etc) when debugging issues. Oftentimes it may be easier than using a debugger. In some cases, combining C code modifications and the debugger is useful.
Inside R source code, one may also call a function breaktodebuger() which does the same thing as entering the debugger from Rgui menu mentioned above. In any code, including packages, a primitive trick is to cause a crash when an interesting code path is reached. One can do this e.g. by *(int *)0 = 1 in C. However, additional consideration is needed on Windows to make sure the debugger is entered (more below).
For example, assume that we modify the PKI package file PKI/src/pki-x509.c as follows:
SEXP PKI_RSAkeygen(SEXP sBits) {
EVP_PKEY *key;
RSA *rsa;
int bits = asInteger(sBits);
if (bits == 2192)
*(int *)0 = 1; /* crash */and reinstall the package using R CMD INSTALL PKI. Note that the trick may not work with later compilers (it already doesn’t with some, but not those used with R on Windows), which are too smart to see that we are inserting a crash.
For this to work, gdb has to be on the image and process that will crash, not on a parent process. One can debug ../../bin/x64/Rgui.exe as shown above, but to do this in Rterm, one needs to debug directly ../../bin/x64/Rterm.exe and run gdb from a standard Windows console program, such as cmd.exe, e.g. as follows:
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19044.1620]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\tomas>c:\rtools44\usr\bin\bash.exe -l
$ cd R-4-4-branch/src/gnuwin32/
$ gdb ../../bin/x64/Rterm.exeThe issue with the Rtools44/Msys2 shell (mintty terminal) is that it needs (or at least used to need) re-execution using winpty for line editing to work. That is done automatically by Rterm on Windows, but then we are not running gdb on the process that will crash.
At the time of this writing, gdb in Msys2/Rtools44 prints a python error message at startup like
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 3, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'libstdcxx'
/etc/gdbinit:6: Error in sourced command file:
Error while executing Python code.This is because of a missing Python module and has been reported to Msys2. That module is part of the gcc package, which one may also install to get rid of this, but then one has to be careful not to accidentally use that version of gcc instead of the one from /x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix. It is safe to instead ignore this error message.
R packages with only R code do not need any special consideration as they don’t need Rtools. R packages with native code (C, Fortran, C++) but without any dependencies on external libraries, should not need any Rtools44-specific customizations; they should work even when authored for Rtools40 or older.
Other packages will typically need some updates/consideration, because traditionally R packages on Windows hard-code the list of libraries to link and the include directories for headers, and so far there is not a working, easy-to-use and reliable alternative (though pkg-config is available since late Rtools43, more below). The updates are needed as things change in Rtools. The changes between Rtools40 and Rtools42 were significant, but the changes between Rtools42 and Rtools44 have been small and only several CRAN packages had to be updated.
Several CRAN packages, when updating from Rtools43 to Rtools44, required addition of an explicit include directive for <cstdint> in C++ code. This is due to a change in GCC 13, which newly requires some of the headers to be included explicitly. See Porting to GCC 13 for more information and for other potential issues when porting code to GCC 13 (and hence from Rtools43 to Rtools44), which were, however, not encountered in CRAN packages.
An upgrade to MinGW-W64 version 11 has revealed some issues with symbol remapping done in R headers, which were not previously seen with MinGW-W64 version 10. A typical situation is that the system headers cannot be compiled with re-mapped error or length. These cases can be normally solved by re-ordering of the include directives so that the system headers are included before R headers. This problem is not specific to Windows. See Writing R Extensions for more details and advice.
During the transition from MSVCRT (and Rtools40) to UCRT (and Rtools 42), patches were created for over a 100 of CRAN and Bioconductor packages. Some packages have been fixed by adopting those patches, but other were fixed differently. In case package authors run into a problem, it may be useful first consulting an old patch when available, because it may be working fine as is or after some small update.
A typical example would be using external libraries from Rtools44 as opposed to downloading them (more in the next section). Also, some packages may have been archived from CRAN as they haven’t been fixed in time, but the patches to fix them are still available, so can be consulted if such packages were to be re-submitted.
Later a number of patches have been created during transitions between Rtools42 and Rtools44, some also for the aarch64 support. Package authors have been notified about these patches, but they can still be found by others for reference in case they were not adopted.
The patches are available here.
During a transitional period before the R 4.2.0 release, these patches were applied automatically by (patched and then un-patched version of) R-devel at installation time, but that is no longer the case. The history of the patches, as well as some that were deleted rather than moved to old_patches, can be found in the subversion history using a subversion client.
Patches for packages that worked with Rtools43 but had to be updated for Rtools44 are available here:
These patches are not applied automatically by R-devel nor any released version of R (they are sometimes applied automatically by experimental “ucrt3” builds). Most of the few changes were changed linking orders due to library updates, or updates for Windows/aarch64. As the packages get updated, these patches are eventually moved away also to old_patches.
With Rtools40, some R packages used to download external static libraries during their installation from “winlibs”/“r-winlib” or other sources. When these downloaded libraries were built for MSVCRT (incompatible with UCRT), one got linking errors.
A common symptom was undefined references to various symbols, often __imp___iob_func, __ms_vsnprintf or _setjmp. Downloading of external code is usually obvious from src/Makevars.win (e.g. presence of “winlibs” or from configure.win) and from installation outputs.
These symptoms will be seen again when one accidentally links an incompatible library built for MSVCRT. To fix this, one needs to instead build against libraries built for UCRT.
While libraries built for UCRT may be available for download, it is not a good idea downloading them during package installation and see CRAN Repository Policy for restrictions on CRAN. This section of the text and the old patches are still available to help package authors to move away from downloading pre-built static libraries.
For transparency, source packages should contain source (not executable code). Using pre-compiled libraries may lead to that after few years the information on how they were built gets lost or significantly outdated and no longer working. Using older binary code may provide insufficient performance (newer compilers tend to optimize better). Also, the CRAN (and Bioconductor) repositories are used as a unique test suite not only for R itself but also the toolchain, and by re-using pre-compiled libraries, some parts will not be tested. Compiler bugs are found and when fixed, the code needs to be re-compiled. Finally, object files (and hence static libraries, particularly when using C++) on Windows tend to become incompatible when even the same toolchain is upgraded. Going from MSVCRT to UCRT is an extreme case when all such code becomes incompatible, and adding support to 64-bit ARM has been another extreme case, but smaller updates of different parts of the toolchain or even some libraries in it lead to incompatibilities. The issues mentioned here are based on experience with the transition to UCRT and Rtools42, and with support for 64-bit ARM added in Rtools44; all of these things have happened and dealing with the downloads and re-use of static libraries was one of the biggest challenges.
As an example of the necessary updates to move from downloading of pre-compiled static libraries, package tiff used to have in src/Makevars.win:
RWINLIB = ../windows/libtiff-4.1.0/mingw$(WIN)
PKG_CPPFLAGS = -I$(RWINLIB)/include
PKG_LIBS = -L$(RWINLIB)/lib -ltiff -ljpeg -lz
all: clean winlibs
winlibs:
"${R_HOME}/bin${R_ARCH_BIN}/Rscript.exe" "../tools/winlibs.R"To make the package build with UCRT and Rtools44, one could replace these lines by:
PKG_LIBS = -ltiff -ljpeg -lz -lzstd -lwebp -llzma
all: clean
Note that even Rtools40 had these libraries, so one could make a similar change also for building the package with Rtools40 (even for MSVCRT, so avoid downloading pre-compiled libraries).
However, the same set and ordering of libraries often does not work with Rtools40, because the names would sometimes be different (in some cases, though, it is still possible to create a linking order that works with both Rtools44 and Rtools40 (and Rtools42, Rtools43), when libraries are available in under the same name).
So, typically, a new Makevars file was needed, and R 4.2 added support for Makevars.ucrt for that, which are used in preference of Makevars.win, when present. See Writing R Extensions for more information about support for configure.ucrt, cleanup.ucrt, Makefile.ucrt and Makevars.ucrt files. Packages meant and specified to work only with R 4.2 and newer should use the traditional .win suffixes with the new content.
The differences between Rtools42 and Rtools44 are small and no new extensions for such files were added.
Since Rtools43 release 5863, pkg-config can be used to establish the linking order for tiff via pkg-config --libs libtiff-4 (more details are provided later in this text).
In some cases, a Makevars file may need to refer directly to a directory with header files or a library file. It is better to avoid such direct references for portability, but if needed, one may use R_TOOLS_SOFT make variable.
R_TOOLS_SOFT is set to the root of the compiled native toolchain, R_TOOLS_SOFT/include is automatically available for headers, R_TOOLS_SOFT/lib is automatically available for libraries, but when one needs to refer to files in different locations or for different tools, one may have to use that variable.
There is also LOCAL_SOFT variable which by default points to the root of the compiled toolchain and in some CRAN packages has been used for this purpose (well before this toolchain existed). However, the original idea of LOCAL_SOFT was to use it for libraries not available with the toolchain, like /usr/local is used on Unix machines to refer to software not part of the OS distribution. It is hence more portable to use R_TOOLS_SOFT for the purpose of referring to the libraries/headers which are part of the toolchain.
The toolchain and libraries are built using a modified version of MXE, which is available here. The build is run on an x86_64 Linux machine, so it involves building a GCC13/MinGW-W64/UCRT cross-compilation toolchain, cross-compiling a large number of libraries needed by R and R packages, and then building also a native compiler toolchain so that R and R packages can be built natively on Windows.
Scripts for setting up the build in docker running Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora are available here. However, this is easy enough and convenient to run natively. On Ubuntu 22.04, following the MXE documentation, install these packages:
apt-get install -y \
autoconf \
automake \
autopoint \
bash \
bison \
bzip2 \
flex \
g++ \
g++-multilib \
gettext \
git \
gperf \
intltool \
libc6-dev-i386 \
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev \
libltdl-dev \
libgl-dev \
libpcre3-dev \
libssl-dev \
libtool-bin \
libxml-parser-perl \
lzip \
make \
openssl \
p7zip-full \
patch \
perl \
python3 \
python3-distutils \
python3-mako \
python3-pkg-resources \
python3-setuptools \
python2 \
python-is-python3 \
ruby \
sed \
unzip \
wget \
xz-utilsAnd then also install these:
apt-get install -y texinfo sqlite3 zstd gtk-doc-tools libopengl-dev libglu1-mesa-dev autoconf-archiveFor Fedora distributions, see the script build_in_docker.sh for the required dependencies. Please refer to the script for any updates to the list of packages shown above also for Debian/Ubuntu.
If you wish to do everything from scratch, run make (or make -j) in mxe (see the next section for how to re-use pre-compiled binaries to reduce the time needed). The build takes about 2 hours on a server machine with 20 cores, so don’t expect that to be fast, but then building individual MXE packages (new, modified) is fast as the build is incremental using make. It has been reported that 8G of RAM and two cores is enough for the build. Even a full re-build is reasonably fast as MXE uses ccache.
The result will appear in mxe/usr, the native toolchain and libraries specifically in mxe/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix. The content of that directory is currently just packed into a tarball available as e.g. rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst here, with some filtering to reduce the size.
The rest of mxe/usr is then packed into a tarball available as e.g. rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zst, as it contains the cross-compilation toolchain.
When cross-compiling for ARM, run make with R_TARGET=aarch64. The build takes considerably longer that for Intel, as LLVM and flang take particularly long: in practice, arrange to run “overnight” when building from scratch. The corresponding tarball would be named rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-aarch64-6094.tar.zst and the toolchain and libraries would appear in directory mxe/usr/aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix.
The toolchain is now regularly built in a docker container using the provided script. One of the advantages is that it is easier to ensure that absolute paths (some files use them, see below) are set up properly, but for experimentation and development, it is easy to work natively on Linux.
By default, make builds the full toolchain. This is controlled by make variable R_TOOLCHAIN_TYPE, so to build the (smaller) base toolchain, run
make -j R_TOOLCHAIN_TYPE=baseTo save the time of building the full toolchain from scratch, e.g. when the goal is to create a new MXE package or upgrade an existing one, one might re-use the pre-compiled code already distributed in the full and the cross-compiler toolchain tarball. This requires root access to the machine (to create a symlink, indeed one may do this in docker) and is not regularly tested as Rtools built tree is normally started from scratch.
With the current/given version number of Rtools44, here we assume it is 6094, one can proceed as follows:
svn checkout -r 6094 https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/toolchain_libs/mxe
cd mxe
wget
https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zst
wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools44/files/rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
mkdir usr
cd usr
tar xf ../rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zst
tar xf ../rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
cd ..
MXE_ROOT=`pwd`/usr
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/mxe
sudo ln -s $MXE_ROOT /usr/lib/mxe
make ccache
make -j MXE_BUILD_DRY_RUN=1
make -j MXE_BUILD_DRY_RUN=1 # repeat until [pkg-list] is last line of output
rm `find usr -name "*.dry-run"`
make -j # a check that nothing is built
The “make ccache” step will build the compiler cache tool and create native C/C++ and cross compilers as links to it. The compiler cache will speed up repeated compilations.
The “dry run” will download all source packages (about 1G at the time of this writing) and it will create as a side effect also time-stamps telling MXE that the packages have already been built. The command needs to be repeated twice (or more times, if there are intermittent download failures) until the output looks like this (nothing downloaded, no “[dry-run]”):
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
Building full R toolchain
[pkg-list] # long list of packages in the list
Please note that errors about failed downloads will be displayed even when the package is later sucessfully downloaded from a backup location. The best way to see all has been downloaded correctly is to keep repeating the command as suggested.
The error re “not a git repository” can be safely ignored.
The time-stamps are necessary, the downloading isn’t (and one probably could easily comment out that part in Makefile if needed, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious elegant solution) because libraries have already been built.
One can then check that MXE knows/thinks that all packages are up to date simply by running
make -jWhich should take a few seconds only to figure out that nothing has to be done, so again “[pkg-list]” should be the last line of output.
Please note that this does not create a completely identical output to building from scratch. It does not include some files excluded from Rtools to limit size (test executables, executables not needed by R packages). It does not re-create symlinks but instead has file copies as this is how the tarballs are created to be Windows-friendly. But it should be enough for most use cases.
Now one can use the dependencies in make file to rebuild only what is needed, e.g. running
touch src/libxml2.mk
make -jrebuilds XML library and all packages that depend on it (note: expect this to take about 15 minutes on a server machine when ran the first time, the second run would be faster because of ccache).
The description above assumes that the target is Intel. For ARM targets, update the names of the tarballs to download and specify the aarch64 target to make.
Some R packages cannot be built or don’t work, because they depend on an external library not available in the toolchain. To add such software, one needs to create an appropriate MXE package or update one. MXE documentation has more details, but for example the package for the tiff library is named “tiff” and available here and did not have to be customized for R:
# This file is part of MXE. See LICENSE.md for licensing information.
PKG := tiff
$(PKG)_WEBSITE := http://simplesystems.org/libtiff/
$(PKG)_DESCR := LibTIFF
$(PKG)_IGNORE :=
$(PKG)_VERSION := 4.2.0
$(PKG)_CHECKSUM := eb0484e568ead8fa23b513e9b0041df7e327f4ee2d22db5a533929dfc19633cb
$(PKG)_SUBDIR := tiff-$($(PKG)_VERSION)
$(PKG)_FILE := tiff-$($(PKG)_VERSION).tar.gz
$(PKG)_URL := https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/$($(PKG)_FILE)
$(PKG)_DEPS := cc jpeg libwebp xz zlib
define $(PKG)_UPDATE
$(WGET) -q -O- 'http://simplesystems.org/libtiff/' | \
$(SED) -n 's,.*>v\([0-9][^<]*\)<.*,\1,p' | \
head -1
endef
define $(PKG)_BUILD
cd '$(1)' && ./configure \
$(MXE_CONFIGURE_OPTS) \
--without-x
$(MAKE) -C '$(1)' -j '$(JOBS)' install $(MXE_DISABLE_CRUFT)
endefOne may add a new package to src, then build it using make pkgname, and when ready, add that to settings.mk to the LOCAL_PKG_LIST so that it is built automatically. One the needs to copy the updated usr/86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix to the Windows machine and perform R package builds there.
When maintaining open-source software distributions, often one may take inspiration from somewhere else. First, many packages are already available in MXE; if they just work, they only need to be added to settings.mk.
Then, some packages may be available in a similar customized version of MXE used by Octave, MXE-Octave. Then some packages popular in the R community but not present in MXE may be available in Msys2 or Rtools40, yet those package configurations are in a different format and not written for cross-compilation nor static linking. Linux distributions, e.g. Debian, then have much bigger selection of build configurations of packages, again in a different format.
If your package needs a library not currently supported by the modified version of MXE used to build in this toolchain, you are welcome to provide a build configuration for such library. Primarily, such package configuration would be contributed directly to upstream MXE, which may be a forcing function to test such package in a wider context (e.g. also dynamic linking, also MSVCRT, etc), but a much wider group of users will be able to benefit from that. Also, it would reduce the maintenance overhead of the toolchain.
As noted above, R packages on Windows need to specify a linking order, ordered names of libraries to link to the package. In the past it had to be done explicitly by listing the libraries, but from Rtools44 release 5863 one can also do this also via pkg-config. For both cases, a script is provided which simplifies the process, as detailed below.
Patches were created for package authors during the transition from Rtools40 to Rtools42. Some of them were still not applied to packages by their maintainers); they are available here and may be used as a starting point for linking orders needed.
Pkg-config is now part of Rtools and can be used from R packages’ Makevars files to establish the linking order for external libraries, given the names of MXE packages providing those libraries. This should reduce the frequency of necessary tweaks to the linking orders on Rtools updates. One can use pkg-config conditionally to support older versions of Rtools, e.g.:
ifeq (,$(shell pkg-config --version 2>/dev/null))
LIBSHARPYUV = $(or $(and $(wildcard $(R_TOOLS_SOFT)/lib/libsharpyuv.a),-lsharpyuv),)
PKG_LIBS = -ltiff -ljpeg -lz -lzstd -lwebp $(LIBSHARPYUV) -llzma
else
PKG_LIBS = $(shell pkg-config --libs libtiff-4)
endif It is not the case for tiff, but with other libraries, it may be necessary to also use special C preprocessor options, and some would regard that as portable to do that always:
PKG_CPPFLAGS = $(shell pkg-config --cflags libtiff-4)The code above can be added to the package src/Makevars.ucrt (src/Makevars.win) of package tiff. One still has to figure out that the pkg-config package name is libtiff-4 (while e.g. the MXE package is tiff, Msys2 package is libtiff), hints are provided below.
One caveat of the test of presense of pkg-config is that if a package is being built using older Rtools (without pkg-config), but pkg-config is found on PATH e.g. from Msys2, that Msys2 pkg-config will be used and package installation would fail. With github actions, an installation of pkg-config may be found from Strawbery perl.
It is not just about finding the .pc files. While it would be possible to instruct a different installation of pkg-config where to find the .pc (pkg-config configuration) files with older versions of Rtools, those .pc files were often missing or incomplete, so the build would fail. Also a different version of pkg-config may not work: the one in Rtools automatically uses --static (looking for static libraries) and explicitly does not use --pure (which doesn’t currently work with pkg-config files in MXE/Rtools), but a different installation may have different defaults. It is not desirable to hard-code these options directly in Makevars files, to e.g. allow for experimental builds with dynamic libraries, etc.
Package authors who wish to use pkg-config in their packages together with github actions should make sure to update Rtools to a version at least 5863. Package authors who want to check their packages using github actions with Rtools42 would have to update their scripts to avoid this problem. For example, one can create a dummy pkg-config script, which will do nothing, in the old Rtools, such as:
echo "#! /bin/bash" > x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin/pkg-configAdditional caveats have been seen with github actions, a version of the Windows 2022 runner. The runner uses GNU make from Chocolatey rather than from Msys2. While the example above testing presence of pkg-config works fine with Msys2 build of GNU make, it currently doesn’t work with that of Chocolatey. The problem is that this build of make would not use the shell to execute pkg-config in $(shell pkg-config --cflags libtiff-4), so it would not find pkg-config (pkg-config is a shell script), but instead it would use a batch file pkg-config.bat from Strawberry perl (even though later on PATH than Rtools), which will fail. This is due to an optimization in make which attempts to avoid running the shell for “simple” code. However, the version check, $(shell pkg-config --version 2>/dev/null) will succeed, because make will use the shell for that, it would run the correct version of pkg-config from Rtools.
One can work this around in the github actions by creating a .bat file wrapper for pkg-config, e.g. via
echo '@sh %~dp0/pkg-config %*' > x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin/pkg-config.batThis wrapper is part of Rtools44 since revision 5868 and uses a shell to execute the pkg-config shell script. It is still desirable to check any github actions installation carefully to see whether the right pkg-config is being used. The problems may differ on different installations of github actions and with different approaches to conditioning on pkg-config presence. For example, just unconditionally querying --libs and conditioning then on whether the result is empty or not would fall back to non-pkg-config branch, hiding a problem in the github actions setup when in fact Rtools already have working pkg-config.
The Makevars.ucrt example above also shows how one may conditionally link libraries based on their presence without pkg-config. Sharpyuv has been added as a separate library in webp at some point, and the conditioning allowed the package to link with older and newer webp.
The linking order can be obtained via pkg-config also on the cross-compilation host (Linux), one may run
env PKG_CONFIG_PATH=usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/lib/pkgconfig ./usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/pkgconf --static libtiff-4 --libs-only-lUsability of pkg-config depends on how libraries specify their dependencies via pkg-config .pc files. Not all software provides such files. Also, often these files are not well tested with static libraries and some dependencies are missing. These files are sometimes generated by other tools, which provide libraries explicitly (via Libs: or Libs.private:) rather than by linking to other .pc files (via Requires: or Requires.private), which make the files harder to read. Also, libraries are sometimes duplicated.
A significant effort has been invested into fixing/adding these files in MXE and in Rtools. The fixes in Rtools were targeted at R packages that needed frequent changes in their linking order on Rtools update in the past (geospatial libraries, libraries using tiff or openssl) and at packages that still are using pre-compiled static libraries from external sources, but where these libraries are available in Rtools (note: patches were provided for packages with explicit linking orders already at the transition from Rtools40 to Rtools42). The remaining R packages which need compilation, that is those that didn’t need frequent updates to linking but which do use libraries from Rtools, may still switch to pkg-config and authors are invited to report issues in .pc files should they appear.
Patches were provided for some of the packages from the first group (which needed frequent updates to linking orders when not using pkg-config).
From the second group, R CRAN packages that are still downloading pre-compiled static libraries, even though they are available in Rtools (which is in violation of CRAN repository policy), can use these pkg-config packages: apcf (geos), av (libavfilter), clustermq (libzmq), curl (curl), eaf (gsl), gdtools (cairo, freetype2), gert (libgit2), ggiraph (libpng), gpg (gpgme), gslnls (gsl), hdf5r (hdf5_hl, WRAP = 1_12_0, -DH5_USE_110_API), ijtiff (libtiff-4), image.textlinedetector (opencv4), jqr (jq), magick (Magick++), opencv (opencv4), openssl (libssh2), pdftools (poppler-cpp), QF (gsl), ragg (freetype2, libtiff-4, libjpeg), rcontroll (gsl), redland (redland), redux (hiredis), RMariaDB (libmariadbclient), RMySQL (libmariadbclient), RPostgres (libpq), rsvg (librsvg-2.0), rvg (libpng), rzmq (libzmq), sodium (libsodium), ssh (libssh), strawr (libcurl), surveyvoi (mpfr), svglite (libpng), systemfonts (freetype2), textshaping (freetype2, harfbuzz, fribidi), V8 (libv8), vdiffr (libpng), webp (libwebp), websocket (openssl), xml2 (libxml-2.0), xslt (libexslt). With some, it is necessary to also set PKG_CPPFLAGS using pkg-config, not just PKG_LIBS.
Again, if your favorite library does not support pkg-config or doesn’t support it well, you are welcome to provide a fix (primarily to the software at hand, possible to MXE, as a last resort directly to Rtools).
This section may be skipped by those looking only for instructions to follow, rather than understanding the details of the problem.
R on Windows uses static linking. Static libraries are just archives of object files, without any references to other static libraries they may need as dependencies. The linker keeps track of the currently undefined symbols and goes through the list of libraries (so archives of object files) from left to right. If an object file from a library defines a symbol that the linker knows is undefined, the linker will add that object file to the binary. It will then add any additional object files from the same library which define any undefined symbols arising from the same library, but it will not add other object files from that library. This may result in that new symbols would become undefined after processing that library. These symbols have to be defined by some of the additional libraries in the list.
For this to work, one needs to make sure that any time one library uses a symbol from another library, it is processed earlier by the linker. This is a problem when there is a loop of dependent libraries, however, one can usually resolve that by adding some libraries multiple times to the list or moving some library in the list, taking advantage of the mechanism described above: only the object files with some currently needed symbols are added from the library.
The GNU linker also allows to specify linking groups, within which linking is repeated in the given order re-starting until all symbols are resolved (see --start-group and --end-group), with a price in performance. This feature has not been needed yet in Rtools44.
Symbols exported from object files and actually missing at linking time are mostly unique in Rtools44. Non-unique are some inlined C++ functions (but then they are not missing at linking time), alternative implementations (e.g. parallel OpenBLAS, serial OpenBLAS, reference BLAS), runtime library wrappers (but they are not missing at linking time). As these exceptions are rare, it was possible to come up with a simple tool which can reasonably well advice on the list and order of libraries to link, with heuristics to resolve some edge cases.
Traditionally, this is done in Unix using lorder script and tsort. lorder generates a list of dependencies between static libraries, defensively assuming that all object files from those libraries are needed. tsort establishes a topological ordering on the result of lorder. One can just try to build an R package without linking any libraries, parse the output from the linker looking for undefined symbols, find static libraries providing such symbols, and establish the topological ordering. The resulting linking order can be then added to the src/Makevars.ucrt (src/Makevars.win), the build of the R package tried again, generating another list of undefined symbols. Then one can merge the list of libraries established previously with the list established now, do the topological sort again, and iterate this way until linking succeeds. findLinkingOrder does this, with some additional heuristics, as shown below.
This is how linking orders for most patched CRAN packages were obtained, but thorough testing is needed to figure out whether they produce a working package. In principle, a better tool could definitely make this process faster and more automated, and not requiring manual iterative linking attempts.
Some manual adaptations to the linking orders created that way were needed, anyway, and probably always will. These included resolving loops (tsort gives warning when it sees them, which is a hint) by shifting libraries in the ordering and adding some twice. Also, some symbols are not completely unique in the toolchain and the semi-automated process did not choose the best library (e.g. libmincore and libwindowsapp should not be linked, because they depend on console Windows DLLs which are not present on Windows Server). -lsbml-static should be used instead of -lsbml.dll (the latter is an import library for a DLL, not a static library with the code per se).
None of this should be needed if the pkg-config databases were fixed to work reliably with static linking. That could be done via improving MXE package configurations, but the effort required may be bigger than improving a hint tool described above, but if fixed, the results could be more reliable. One still would need to know the right names of the pkg-config packages, which are distribution specific.
Note that similar problems with other toolchains may be hidden when pre-built (bigger) static libraries are being downloaded during package installation.
In the end all the linking orders in patches for CRAN and Bioconductor packages mentioned above were established via computation over the compiled static libraries as described above, based on which findLinkingOrder has been created.
This example uses Rtools44 and binary build of R. Run Rtools44 shell (Msys2 bash), download and extract the source package tiff. Create a temporary Makevars.ucrt file as follows:
PKG_LIBS = -Wl,--no-demangle $(shell cat /tmp/tiff.libs)Get the findLinkingOrder tool
svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/linking_orderRun the tool, specifying the file to hold the found linking order:
./linking_order/findLinkingOrder tiff /tmp/tiff.libsFirst time, it will take long as it will be creating an index of the libraries. The end of the output is:
Installation failed, trying to find required link order
-ltiff
Saved in /tmp/tiff.libsWhich means, that the linking was not successful (indeed, we provided no libraries), but we know that the directly missing symbols will be satisfied by -ltiff, which was automatically added. So lets simply run the tool again:
./linking_order/findLinkingOrder tiff /tmp/tiff.libsThe output now ends with:
Installation failed, trying to find required link order
-ltiff -lzstd -lz -lwebpdecoder -lwebp -llzma -ljpeg -lcfitsio
Saved in /tmp/tiff.libsWhich means that -ltiff was not enough, but there is an extended suggestions. Lets run the tool the same way again. The output ends with
Installation succeeded!Which means the list of libraries is complete. So now we can modify the Makevars.ucrt using the computed list of libraries:
PKG_LIBS=-ltiff -lzstd -lz -lwebpdecoder -lwebp -llzma -ljpeg -lcfitsioThe -Wl,--no-demangle option is removed, because it is only needed for the tool (and only for code using C++).
The script is also useful whe one wants to use pkg-config. In that case, it is probably simpler to use simply:
PKG_LIBS = -Wl,--no-demangleand provide the tool with a non-existent dummy file, e.g.:
rm /tmp/dummy.libs ; /linking_order/findLinkingOrder tiff /tmp/dummy.libsThe first iteration would still yield -ltiff. One would then inspect the directory with pkg-config files (x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/lib/pkgconfig) and look for a .pc file corresponding to it. It is usually easy to guess the name of the .pc file, but this command commonly helps when needed:
grep -- -ltiff *pc | grep Libs: | cut -d: -f1which gives:
gtk+-2.0.pc
gtk+-win32-2.0.pc
libtiff-4.pc
spatialite.pcAnd it can be easily found manually that libtiff-4 is the name of the pkg-config file for the tiff library. Typically, guessing the name of the .pc file is easier than this. Unfortunately, names of these .pc files vary somewhat between platforms/distributions.
Sometimes a package DLL is linked succesfully, but the DLL cannot be loaded. Sometimes it can be loaded on the machine where it was built, but not on another machine. One example is the linking of console API present on Windows 10, but not on Windows Server. A common problem why a DLL cannot be loaded is that a dependent DLL is not found (unlike static libraries, DLLs know their dependencies). This is a common problem which can happen on Windows with any toolchain.
When this happens to a DLL linked to an application, such as Rblas linked to R, an error message will appear helpfully saying that Rblas could not be found. However, when such DLL is being loaded explicitly via a Windows API call (to LoadLibrary), which is the case when loading DLLs of R packages, Windows is unable to say which DLL is missing:
Error: package or namespace load failed for 'magick' in inDL(x, as.logical(local
), as.logical(now), ...):
unable to load shared object 'C:/msys64/home/tomas/ucrt3/svn/ucrt3/r_packages/r
inst/library/00LOCK-magick/00new/magick/libs/x64/magick.dll':
LoadLibrary failure: The specified module could not be found.Note: in the above, magick.dll is present on the path listed. It is some of its dependencies that is not found, but Windows would tell which one. The confusing error message comes directly from Windows and R cannot possibly fix that.
There is still a way to debug this. One can install WinDbg from Microsoft (for free), which also includes gflags.
Using gflags /i Rterm.exe +sls (note gflags gets installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers\x64\) set “loader snaps” for the R executable. Then run R, get its process ID using Sys.getpid(), start WinDbg, attach to the R process via that process ID, type ‘g’ (to continue running). In the R process, try to load the problematic package, e.g. library(magick). This will produce a number of messages, but in this case, one of them was
3e94:29f8 @ 674068078 - LdrpProcessWork - ERROR: Unable to load DLL: "api-ms-win-core-console-l1-2-0.dll", Parent Module: "C:\msys64\home\tomas\ucrt3\svn\ucrt3\r\build_opt\trunk\library\magick\libs\x64\magick.dll", Status: 0xc0000135Which made it clear that api-ms-win-core-console-l1-2-0.dll was the missing DLL.
The flag can be removed using -sls. Note that the Msys2 console (mintty with bash, by default) is very different from cmd.exe in Windows: the latter uses a different API and e.g. sometimes shows more debugging messages, etc. It is better to use cmd.exe when debugging (with WinDbg but also gdb). One may use gdb from Msys2 with this toolchain the same way as with Rtools40.
R packages are sometimes linked against dynamic libraries installed by external applications. It may become necessary to rebuild such libraries as well to be built for UCRT. It is advisable for encodings to be handled properly (yet that depends on how that library handles encodings), but it may be the least inconvenient solution also to avoid other clashes between runtimes, such as in memory allocation.
JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) is used by R package rjags and some other packages. JAGS is installed as a standalone application via its interactive installer and includes shared libraries (JAGS library and a number of modules) and C headers. R packages at build time use those C headers and link against that JAGS shared library.
When R package rjags is built with Rtools44 and linked against the JAGS library from the official JAGS 4.3.0 distribution, it does not work. The linking of the R package library is successful, but building of the package indices fails, unfortunately without any detailed error message. The problem is that building of package indices already involves loading the rjags package and running it, and that crashes because of C runtime mismatch, the JAGS library built for MSVCRT ends up calling UCRT free function on an object allocated using MSVCRT.
There is now an official distribution of JAGS 4.3.1 for UCRT, which needs to be used with R >= 4.2 on Windows instead of JAGS 4.3.0. The following text contains instructions which were used before to create an unofficial JAGS 4.3.0 build using Rtools42, which may still be useful as inspiration for building other applications. The instructions still work with Rtools44 and JAGS 4.3.2 for Intel platforms, except that the patch for the installer no longer needs to be applied.
The script used to create the unofficial build is available here.
JAGS uses configure, but when running in Msys2, the host system identification is different from what the MXE-built toolchain has, so some utilities (but not all) are not detected correctly. configure has to be run with --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix.
Futhermore, as documented in JAGS installation manual, JAGS uses libtool and libtool will not link a static library to a shared library created as “module”. This causes trouble for some JAGS modules, such as “bugs”, which link against LAPACK and BLAS. Rtools44 includes static libraries for reference LAPACK and BLAS, but libtool refuses to link them (also, they don’t have .la files).
This can be solved by building wrapper dynamic libraries for these static LAPACK and BLAS libraries, following instructions from the JAGS manual, with the toolchain on PATH (as when building R and packages):
export TLIB=~/svn/ucrt3/r/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/lib
dlltool -z libblas.def --export-all-symbols $TLIB/libblas.a
gfortran -shared -o libblas.dll -Wl,--out-implib=libblas.dll.a libblas.def $TLIB/libblas.a
dlltool -z liblapack.def --export-all-symbols $TLIB/liblapack.a
gfortran -shared -o liblapack.dll -Wl,--out-implib=liblapack.dll.a liblapack.def $TLIB/liblapack.a -L. -lblas
SHAREDLB=`pwd`One can then provide these libraries to JAGS configure via -with-blas="-L$SHAREDLB -lblas" --with-lapack="-L$SHAREDLB -llapack", where $SHAREDLB is the directory with liblapack.dll and libblas.dll. These two DLLs have to be then copied into the JAGS build tree before running the installer:
./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix --with-blas="-L$SHAREDLB -lblas" --with-lapack="-L$SHAREDLB -llapack"
make win64-install
cp $SHAREDLB/libblas.dll $SHAREDLB/liblapack.dll win/inst64/bin
make installerBut, before running make installer, one needs to fix the installer script for 64-bit-only build. The original installer supported both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture, but R on Windows since R 4.2 and Rtools42 only supports 64-bit. The patch is available with the build script, here.
This example only works on the Intel platform.
Nlopt is included in Rtools44, so it does not have to be built for use with R packages (and it shouldn’t be according to CRAN repository policy, because it is available in the system). But it can be built in Rtools44 simply as follows (version 2.7.1):
export PATH=/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin/:$PATH
tar xf v2.7.1.tar.gz
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../nlopt-2.7.1 -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DNLOPT_PYTHON=OFF \
-DNLOPT_OCTAVE=OFF -DNLOPT_MATLAB=OFF -DNLOPT_GUILE=OFF \
-DNLOPT_SWIG=OFF
cmake --build .On ARM platform, the path to the toolchain is `/aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/bin/’.
CMake is part of the toolchain (so built by MXE) and is patched to use Unix Makefiles as the default generator.
R is distibuted with a binary build of Tcl/Tk (aka “Tcl/Tk bundle”), which is needed for the tcltk package and can be used from R, but also can be used externally. Since R 4.2, the bundle is cross-compiled on Linux and only supports 64-bit builds, as does R 4.2. The current version is 8.6.13. Traditionally the bundle includes TkTable and BWidget. It is already part of R distribution, so the description here is only to give an example.
Scripts used to build the bundle are available in subversion here.
One needs first to download the toolchain tarball, a file named such as rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-6094.tar.zst from Rtools44, available here. This tarball includes the libraries and headers, which are needed, and the native compiler toolchain, which is not. We also need to download the cross-compiler tarball, a file named such as rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zst.
These should be extracted in the same directory, /usr/lib/mxe/usr (or a directory simlinked from there), e.g.
cd /usr/lib/mxe/usr
tar xf rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-6094.tar.zst
tar xf rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zstWhen targeting ARM, these tarballs would be named rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-aarch64-6094.tar.zst and rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-aarch64-6094.tar.zst and would be extracted to /usr/lib/mxe/usr_aarch64.
The cross-compiler needs to be put on PATH
export PATH=/usr/lib/mxe/usr/bin:$PATHThe concrete commands can be found in the script and the bundle had to be patched to build successfuly with this version of GCC and UCRT, but a general rule applicable to also other software is that one again needs to specify the host and target, x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix (this identification is used by MXE, below referred to as TRIPLET), so e.g.
BINST=`pwd`/Tcl
./configure --enable-64bit --prefix=$BINST --enable-threads --bindir=$BINST/bin --libdir=$BINST/lib --target=$TRIPLET --host=$TRIPLETis used to configure Tcl.
When building for ARM, use --enable-64bit=arm" in the configure command above. TheTRIPLETisaarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix`.
The “base” toolchain bundle is sufficient for Tcl/Tck, but some other software may require the “full” bundle, which has more pre-compiled libraries.
Similarly to the native compilation of Nlopt, one can also cross-compile it (again, please note this is just an example, as Nlopt is already present in Rtools44). Set up the cross-compiler as for Tcl/Tk, but in addition create links for the cross-compilers to be found by cmake.
cd /usr/lib/mxe/usr
ln -st x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin \
../../bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-gcc \
../../bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-g++Alternatively, see the section on “Setting up MXE build from pre-built tarballs” for how to set up compiler cache for the cross-compilers instead of those links.
Once this is done, build NLopt as follows:
export PATH=/usr/lib/mxe/usr/bin:$PATH
tar xf v2.7.1.tar.gz
mkdir build
cd build
x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-cmake ../nlopt-2.7.1 \
-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DNLOPT_PYTHON=OFF \
-DNLOPT_OCTAVE=OFF -DNLOPT_MATLAB=OFF -DNLOPT_GUILE=OFF \
-DNLOPT_SWIG=OFF
x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-cmake --build .When targeting ARM, the links for the compiler are already present. The toolchain is extracted under /usr/lib/mxe/usr_aarch64. The compilation can be done by
aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-cmake ../nlopt-2.7.1 \
-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DNLOPT_PYTHON=OFF \
-DNLOPT_OCTAVE=OFF -DNLOPT_MATLAB=OFF -DNLOPT_GUILE=OFF \
-DNLOPT_SWIG=OFF
aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix-cmake --build .The Rtools44 files are available here.
Names of those for the Intel target are like:
rtools44-6094-6039.exe
rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-6094.tar.zst
rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-6094.tar.zst
rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-6094.tar.zst
tcltk-6094-5412.zipIn the above, 6094 is the version of the toolchain. 6039 is the version of scripts used to build the Rtools44 installer. 5412 is the version of scripts used to build the Tcl/Tk bundle.
The version of the toolchain is also stored in file x86_64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/.version in all the toolchain distributions and Rtools44 installed via the installer.
These versions correspond to subversion releases of these subversion directories for the toolchain, the rtools installer, and the Tcl/Tk bundle:
https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/toolchain_libs
https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/rtools
https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/tcl_bundleNames of the files for the ARM target are like:
rtools44-aarch64-6094-6039.exe
rtools44-toolchain-libs-base-aarch64-6094.tar.zst
rtools44-toolchain-libs-cross-aarch64-6094.tar.zst
rtools44-toolchain-libs-full-aarch64-6094.tar.zst
tcltk-aarch64-6094-5412.zipThe version of the toolchain is also stored in file aarch64-w64-mingw32.static.posix/.version in all the toolchain distributions and Rtools44 installed via the installer.
Please note that to be able to fully reproduce the builds, one also needs exactly the same versions of external software (both executables but also source code for all open-source software that is built into the toolchain libraries). The repositories shown have docker scripts to ensure that the exact versions used are recorded and the process is reproducible from scratch. Also, MXE uses backup download locations for software libraries. However, in case of interest in fully reproducing the builds, it is adviced to do that rather soon, when the external software will most likely still be downloadable, and keep copies for later use.