[R] R packages for Mac Users

[Marc Schwartz]

> On Feb 23, 2016, at 11:10 AM, Scott Colwell <scolwell at uoguelph.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Does anyone know if all the R packages that are available for Windows users are also available for Mac users? 
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Scott


Hi,

In general, yes, if the package is available from CRAN, but there are some exceptions, where you may have to install a package from source, rather than from a pre-compiled binary. In that case, if the package is "pure R", there should not be any issues. If there is C/C++ or FORTRAN source code in the package, you will need to have additional tools installed on your Mac (e.g. XCode, etc.) to install the package.

You can check the CRAN page for a particular package and see what is available.

Some packages are not on CRAN and may be available via other sources, like GitHub, etc. You would have to look at each, to get a sense for any issues there.

There are also two Mac specific resources that you should be aware of, if not already:

  R for Mac OS X FAQ:
  https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html

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

Regards,

Marc Schwartz