Microsoft R Open 3.3.2, Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to version 3.3.2, adds new bundled packages and updates others, and upgrades the Intel Math Kernel Libraries.
The updated R 3.3.2 engine includes some performance improvements (particularly in calculation of eigenvalues), better handling of date axes in graphics, and improved documentation for the methods package. (See here for a complete list of fixes.) There are no user-visible changes in the language itself, which means that scripts and packages should work without changes from MRO 3.3.1.
This update to MRO comes bundled with some additional packages, notably jsonlite (for fast processing of JSON-formatted data), png (to support reading and writing of PNG images), R6 (allowing the creation of classes with reference semantice), and curl (for connecting to web-based data sources). The checkpoint and deployrRserve packages have also been updated.
The MKL libraries, which provide high-performance matrix and vector calculations to MRO, have also been updated. (This fixes some issues with matrix multiplication and arima that were reported.)
For reproducibility, installing packages with MRO 3.3.2 will by default get you package versions as of November 1, 2016. Many packages have been updated or released since MRO 3.3.1. (See here for some highlights of new packages.) As always, if you want to use newer versions of CRAN packages (or access older versions, for reproducibility), just use the checkpoint function to access the CRAN Time Machine.
MRO is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux. This release adds support for two new platforms: MacOS Sierra (10.12) and Ubuntu 16.04.
We hope you find Microsoft R Open useful, and if you have any comments or questions please visit the Microsoft R Open forum. To download Microsoft R Open (it's free!), simply follow the link below.
It's quite unfortunate that Microsoft had decided to distribute MRO for Windows as an msi file (especially so given that the advice for non-admin users is to install as admin on another machine and simply copy the folder-structure).
Posted by: AM | November 30, 2016 at 13:43