[R] Moving to Mac OS X

[Marc Schwartz]

On Sep 11, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Victor Manuel Garcia Guerrero wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have been using R on Windows for a long time, but now I am ready  
> to move to Mac OS X, but I was just wondering if R works better on  
> Mac than on Windows. This is because I had some memory size issues  
> in the past.
>
> Another question is if some of you know an R editor for Mac (just  
> like Tinn-R).
>
> Thanks.

The notion of "better" is always in the eyes of the useR and will  
depend upon specific criteria.

OSX can run R in both 32 bit and 64 bit modes and indeed the default  
OSX download for R provided by Simon installs and supports both. If  
you use the 32 bit version, then from a memory management standpoint,  
you will not see demonstrable gains over Windows. However, with the 64  
bit version, you will avail yourself of a much larger memory address  
space as compared to running 32 bit R on Windows. That of course  
presumes that you have a lot of RAM in your Mac to actually take  
advantage of the larger address space.

The 64 bit memory address space is also available via Linux, with  
appropriate hardware.


You might want to review the R OSX FAQ:

   http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html

and also note that there is a OSX specific e-mail list:

   https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac


As far as editors, I am not familiar with the details of Tinn-R, but  
ESS/Emacs is available for OSX and this is what I use (continuing what  
I had been using on Linux for the past number of years).  Others will  
likely be able to provide other recommendations and you might want to  
search the R-SIG-Mac list archives as no doubt there have been such  
discussions in the past.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz