Microsoft R Open 3.4.2 now available

Microsoft R Open (MRO), Microsoft's enhanced distribution of open source R, has been upgraded to version 3.4.2 and is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This update upgrades the R language engine to the latest R 3.4.2 and updates the bundled packages. 

MRO is 100% compatible with all R packages. MRO 3.4.2 points to a fixed CRAN snapshot taken on October 15 2017, and you can see some highlights of new packages released since the prior version of MRO on the Spotlights page. As always you can use the built-in checkpoint package to access packages from an earlier date (for compatibility) or a later date (to access new and updated packages).

MRO 3.4.2 is based on R 3.4.2, a minor update to the R engine (you can see the detailed list of updates to R here). This update is backwards-compatible with R 3.4.1 (and MRO 3.4.1), so you shouldn't encounter an new issues by upgrading. 

We hope you find Microsoft R Open useful, and if you have any comments or questions please visit the Microsoft R Open forum. You can follow the development of Microsoft R Open at the MRO Github repository. To download Microsoft R Open, simply follow the link below.

MRAN: Download Microsoft R Open

Comments

[Tom Philippi]

Thanks for keeping MRO much closer to the current CRAN version than RRO could! I use a lot of rapidly-developing domain-specific packages with binaries (and sometimes source) incompatible with older versions of R, so the old RRO 3-4 versions behind R would not work for me. Every package I use currently works with 3.4.1 & 3.4.2, so this update prevents _having_ to abandon MRO for some tasks until it catches up. MRO lets me easily throw 14 cores at all simulations via doParallel + foreach at work under Win 7. [At home I can run linux and run multi-cores and GPU-computing for raster operations, so I can crank with inferior hardware. Alas, I just don't get paid for that work.]