[R] R on Linux, and R on Windows , any difference in maturity+stability?

[Jose Quesada]

Robert Wilkins <iwritecode2 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Will R have more glitches on one operating system as opposed to
> another, or is it pretty much the same?
> 
> robert
> 
> 

One important difference is that, if you are unsing large datasets and need
memory, then windows is by far the worst. 
CRAN R is 32 bit and can only address 1.5 Gb of memory (or something similar; I
don't really understand why).

While there's a 64-bit version of R for windows (revolution-computing.com) I
would advise against using it, for several reasons. While revolution has
provided very nice packages to the community (e.g., foreach), the win-64 port as
of today is certainly the worst platform to do work on. Reasons:
(1) it's R 2.7.2
(2) Many important packages will never be ported
(3) Some packages (particularly those depending on Rjava) would not work properly
(4) There's a proprietary repository, where most packages are outrageously
outdated. 
(5) Most help you find on R-help will not apply. Instead, you have 'paid'
support. Said support is slow, and close to useless in most cases.
(6) Packages that rely on external tools (e.g., mysql) will take a lot of work
to get going. 

And of course, one have to pay for a yearly license, to have the privilege to
work under the above conditions.

If you need 64-bit right now, my advice is to switch to basically any other
platform.

Note: this may change any time, since they are working on a continuous build
that will keep the releases in sync with mainstream R.

Jose Quesada, PhD.
Max Planck Institute, Human Development, Berlin
http://www.josequesada.name/