This email is mostly of interest to those that build Mac binaries or want to
maintain binary compatibility with CRAN. Also if you are on an Apple Silicon
Mac (M1,M2,…) and your macOS is *older* than macOS 14, please read the last
paragraph at the bottom.
Our current Mac R release and package builds are targeting macOS 11 (Big Sur)
for both Intel and arm64 to offer as wide coverage of users as possible.
Unfortunately, Apple has removed hardware support for most Intel Macs from
recent macOS versions which means that majority of Intel Mac users cannot
upgrade their OS - which is reflected in our estimated macOS version user share
and therefore we cannot change the target for x86_64 binaries without
abandoning a large fraction of our users.
However, all arm64 (Apple Silicon) Mac hardware is supported by latest macOS
versions so there is no practical obstacle for Apple Silicon users to upgrade
their macOS. Therefore we are considering moving the minimum target for CRAN R
binaries and packages to macOS 14 (Sonoma), because it allows us and packages
to leverage several new technologies and tools. To that effect R-devel arm64
builds have been switched to a "sonoma-arm64" build target, with the
corresponding repository URL of /bin/macosx/sonoma-arm64/contrib/4.6 (output of
contrib.url("", type="binary") in those builds). The binaries will be built
with the following setup/settings:
Host OS: macOS 15.7.1 (Sequoia)
Toolchain: Xcode/CLT 26.0, GNU Fortran 14.2 (from CRAN)
SDKROOT=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.4.sdk
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=14.0
Accordingly, the recipes binaries are built using the same settings and are
available in following repository:
https://mac.r-project.org/bin/darwin23/arm64/
Corresponding nightly R binaries are available as usual at
https://mac.r-project.org/sonoma/last-success/
The goal is to remove the existing big-sur-arm64 R-devel binaries in favor of
the sonoma-arm64 R-devel build. Since we are still far away from the R-devel
release, all this is considered experimental and may change in the future
(possibly Fortran upgrade is in the cards), but given that this is not a minor
change, I want to give others the opportunity to test the new setup and comment
as appropriate. I would also like to hear from any Apple Silicon users that are
unable to upgrade to macOS 14 or higher for whatever reason (corporate system
management etc.).
Thanks,
Simon
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