Why doesn't Rtools 3.1 support C++11 on Windows

Question

The latest version of Rtools (3.1) does not appear to include a version of g++ that supports C++11. Is there any particular reason for this?

Answer 1

Precious volunteer time, maybe?

Rtools uses g++ 4.6.2. Which is totally fine for the use by R as R is a C program.

Now, many of us use C++ along with R (and judging from the Rcpp tag, you do too), and it does indeed pose a problem if you want to use features available only in g++ 4.7, 4.8, the AFAIK not-yet released 4.9, or an equivalent clang version --- and when you are in fact restricted to Windows.

On Linux or OS X, things are a little easier (though OS X had its own share of issue after the 10.9 release but it is getting better).

Someone needs to volunteer to provide a better / newer MinGW, or to pay someone to provide it. If you look at old release announcements, the Rtools compiler is not upgraded all that often. From what I can tell, there is only one R Core member working on this. And while that particular R Core member is very knowledgeable about C++ and and the state of the g++ compiler on Windows, he is also predominatly a C programmer...

Answer 2

The compiler shipped with Rtools (gcc 4.6.3) is good enough to run the test suite of the devel version of Rcpp11, which uses features of C++11 quite extensively.

Details on unsupported features are available here, but the supported subset already feels like C++11. There were only a few things I had to compromise (delegated constructors and template aliases). They make code better, but we can live without them for now.