#7: C++14, R and Travis — A useful hack

Welcome to the seventh post in the rarely relevant R ramblings series, or R⁴ for short.

We took a short break as several conferences and other events interfered during the month of May, keeping us busy and away from this series. But we are back now with a short and useful hack I came up with this weekend.

The topic is C++14, i.e. the newest formally approved language standard for C++, and its support in R and on Travis CI. With release R 3.4.0 of a few weeks ago, R now formally supports C++14. Which is great.

But there be devils. A little known fact is that R hangs on to its configuration settings from its own compile time. That matters in cases such as the one we are looking at here: Travis CI. Travis is a tremendously useful and widely-deployed service, most commonly connected to GitHub driving "continuous integration" (the ‘CI’) testing after each commit. But Travis CI, for as useful as it is, is also maddingly conservative still forcing everybody to live and die by [Ubuntu 14.04]http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/). So while we all benefit from the fine work by Michael who faithfully provides Ubuntu binaries for distribution via CRAN (based on the Debian builds provided by yours truly), we are stuck with Ubuntu 14.04. Which means that while Michael can provide us with current R 3.4.0 it will be built on ancient Ubuntu 14.04.

Why does this matter, you ask? Well, if you just try to turn the very C++14 support added to R 3.4.0 on in the binary running on Travis, you get this error:

** libs
Error in .shlib_internal(args) : 
  C++14 standard requested but CXX14 is not defined

And you get it whether or not you define CXX14 in the session.

So R (in version 3.4.0) may want to use C++14 (because a package we submitted requests it), but having been built on the dreaded Ubuntu 14.04, it just can’t oblige. Even when we supply a newer compiler. Because R hangs on to its compile-time settings rather than current environment variables. And that means no C++14 as its compile-time compiler was too ancient. Trust me, I tried: adding not only g++-6 (from a suitable repo) but also adding C++14 as the value for CXX_STD. Alas, no mas.

The trick to overcome this is twofold, and fairly straightforward. First off, we just rely on the fact that g++ version 6 defaults to C++14. So by supplying g++-6, we are in the green. We have C++14 by default without requiring extra options. Sweet.

The remainder is to tell R to not try to enable C++14 even though we are using it. How? By removing CXX_STD=C++14 on the fly and just for Travis. And this can be done easily with a small script configure which conditions on being on Travis by checking two environment variables:

#!/bin/bash

## Travis can let us run R 3.4.0 (from CRAN and the PPAs) but this R version
## does not know about C++14.  Even though we can select CXX_STD = C++14, R
## will fail as the version we use there was built in too old an environment,
## namely Ubuntu "trusty" 14.04.
##
## So we install g++-6 from another repo and rely on the fact that is
## defaults to C++14.  Sadly, we need R to not fail and hence, just on
## Travis, remove the C++14 instruction

if [[ "${CI}" == "true" ]]; then
    if [[ "${TRAVIS}" == "true" ]]; then 
        echo "** Overriding src/Makevars and removing C++14 on Travis only"
        sed -i 's|CXX_STD = CXX14||' src/Makevars
    fi
fi

I have deployed this now for two sets of builds in two distinct repositories for two "under-development" packages not yet on CRAN, and it just works. In case you turn on C++14 via SystemRequirements: in the file DESCRIPTION, you need to modify it here.

So to sum up, there it is: C++14 with R 3.4.0 on Travis. Only takes a quick Travis-only modification.