Is the bigvis package for R not available for R version 3.0.1?

Question

I'm developing an app designed to handle big data and was having problems graphing the data in a useful way because of the sheer amount of plot points. My initial idea was to create a little algorithm that, based on the size of the data, divides the data points into about 30 subsets and takes the average of all the points in these subsets (what are the faults of this implementation by the way)?

Then I learned about bigVis, which does a lot of the big data representation for you, and I really want to try this library out.

I have a problem installing it. I've done:

>install_github("devtools")
>install.packages("bigVis")

Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘bigVis’ is not available (for R version 3.0.1)

I've also done:

>install_github("devtools")
>devtools::install_github("bigvis")

* installing *source* package 'bigvis' ...
** libs

*** arch - i386
ERROR: compilation failed for package 'bigvis'
* removing 'C:/Program Files/R/R-3.0.1/library/bigvis'
Error: Command failed (1)

Does anyone know what this error is?

Thanks

Gypsie

Did you install Rtools? – Sneakers

@hadley: I was surprised that 'doze builds were being attempted for i386. Has that architecture only been dropped from Mac packages? – Hegelianism

@DWin yes, I think by default windows still compiles for both 32 and 64 bit. – Sneakers

I have installed Rtools from here, latest version cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools – Gypsie

@user2522217, have you resolved the problem? – Calvincalvina

i know i'm late to the party, but i am still having this installation problem on windows despite find_rtools() returning TRUE – Korns

@AnthonyDamico I just tried it and the install worked fine. Good luck. – Bosh

@Bosh yeah i might be sol. my exact errors posted here: github.com/hadley/bigvis/issues/30 – Korns

@AnthonyDamico What is your installed version of Rcpp? And what is the result of Sys.which("g++") ? One of your error logs indicates the g++ compiler can't be found. I installed g++ recently to solve a different problem... – Bosh

@Bosh that was it. question answered..thank you! – Korns

Answer 1

assuming you've got Rtools.exe installed, here are the steps to get bigvis installed if it still does not work. you need a 64-bit compiler in order to run the Rcpp package, one of the dependencies of bigvis

1. in R, confirm g++ isn't installed (or isn't 64-bit)

   Sys.which( "g++" )

2. download mingw-w64 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ (Since the mingw-w64 project on sourceforge.net is moving to mingw-w64.org i suggest to use mingw-w64.org)

3. when the mingw-w64 installer pops up, be sure to change the architecture row from i686 to x86_64 then let it install

4. in the windows start menu search bar, type environment and an option edit the system environment variables should pop up. click it.

5. edit your PATH and add a semicolon plus the folder name of the bin directory of the mingw-w64 program that you just installed. for me, it was ;C:\Program Files\mingw-w64\x86_64-4.9.0-posix-seh-rt_v3-rev2\mingw64\bin but this will change for future versions

6. close & re-open R and Sys.which('g++') should now indicate the mingw-x64 directory

   Sys.which('g++')
   "C:\PROGRA~1\MINGW-~1\X86_64~1.0-P\mingw64\bin\G__~1.EXE"

7. devtools:::install_github("hadley/bigvis") should now complete successfully

Korns

Answer 2

This works for me, using R v 3.0.1 on Windows 7.

Directly download the current package from GitHub:

download.file("https://github.com/hadley/bigvis/archive/master.zip", destfile = "bigvis.zip")

Unzip it, just so that we leave nothing to chance (though you could use the .zip itself):

unzip("bigvis.zip")

and install from source:

install.packages("bigvis-master", repos = NULL, type = "source")`

Mockup