R and Rstudio on Apple silicon

Question

has anyone got some info about future roadmap for R and Rstudio in order to support new ARM architecture?

I know that probably we should rely on rosetta2 but I'm just wondering if we will be able to run native code.

Answer 1

Take a look at these links, they are gathering information about M1 compatible software and R and RStudio seem to be running fine under Rosetta2 and the developers are working hard on a native solution.

You can also follow this blog.

UPDATE!

Here are some benchmark results leman and I just did.

R under Rosetta2 (M1) is basically 70% faster on average then on my 2.3GHz i5 16GB RAM late 2017 MBPro.

Answer 2

RStudio is written in a mix of languages, that annoyingly includes some FORTRAN 90.

The issue being there isn't a native, stable, open source, Apple Silicon compiler for FORTRAN 90, though there are commercial compilers, sold by NAG and ARM. There is an ancient, and free GNU tool, f2c, that converts FORTRAN source to C, but it only supports the FORTRAN 66 and 77 standards.

So either:

The like of GNU's f2c need to be tweaked to support the FORTRAN 90 standard, by adding some non trivial logic to handle the intrinsics added between the 77 and 90 standards, the other changes are relatively trivial. Followed by a tweak to the dependency list for Apple silicon builds of RStudio, to convert the offending modules to C, before natively compiling.

Some effort is made into porting the GNU Fortran compiler, gfortran, to Apple's take on ARM's architecture (proposed for the summer 2022, GNU Compiler Collection, v12.#, though experimental support is available in a V11 fork). With the package natively compiled soon after.

Someone with a commercial, Apple Silicon, Fortran 90 compiler, volunteers to periodically build, run the test suite, sign and submit universal binaries, for RStudio, to the Apple store.

Alternatively the FORTRAN 90 modules included in RStudio, be hand translated into a language, with a native Apple Silicon compiler, say C or C++.

At a push, Apple elects to write and maintain their own FORTRAN 90, 95, 2003, 2008, 2018 compiler, for the architecture (or buys the right for a compiler from ARM or NAG).