Trevor L. Davis

@henrikbengtsson@mastodon.social

... via Wine on Linux works pretty well and is straightforward to install and run I've haven't tried Rtools or building R from source, so don't know how well that part works

With the help of https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-devel.html and a bunch of trial and error Claude Code was able to help me write a Dockerfile and some bash shell scripts that lets me cross-compile my windows() patches and then update my Windows R-devel installation in Wine so I can then test them in Linux.

@coolbutuseless@fosstodon.org

... unreviewed patches! ...

If not reviewed in the meantime I suspect if I send Paul Murrell a polite e-mail I can get some/all of these reviewed. Most of my bug fixes seem to eventually get merged in.

when playing with {eventloop}

It would be cool if we could more easily support {eventloop}-like apps cross-platform. I know @yutannihilation@fosstodon.org was working on https://github.com/yutannihilation/vellogd-r but development seems to have stalled. It would be nice if windows() would just work.

@coolbutuseless@fosstodon.org

1. windows() mouse I/O could use some attention: https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17684#c4
2. windows() lacks an Idle event
3. Given Windows R already compiles with Cairo and Cairo provides a Windows drawing surface I suspect windows(type = "cairo") would not be that difficult to implement which would add support for graphics features like patterns, gradients, affine transformations, etc.

However I already have four graphics related patches that R Core hasn't gotten around to reviewing.

Are there legal and free ways to compile #RStats for Windows and test a patched `windows()` graphics device from Linux?

It seems there used to be free virtual Windows images for developers but Microsoft ended that a couple of years ago?

Is there some pathway where I could cross-compile R from source and then faithfully emulate the `windows()` graphics device with an emulator like Wine?

I don't see how to play with an interactive `windows()` device through a service like GitHub Actions.

@mdsumner@rstats.me In R 4.2+ within certain graphics devices you can do arbitrary affine transformations of grobs. In particular if you have a rectangular grob (raster and/or vector) you can arbitrarily project it onto a 3d mesh quad under any *parallel* projection. Technically in this example I was manually viewport clipping a bigger rectangular grob into smaller rectangular grobs I then manually projected. This is all pretty low level. Speedwise slower than {rgl} rendering. https://github.com/trevorld/affiner

An experiment in visualizing peg doll style pawns with a "belt" sticker wrapped around them in R's {grid} graphics by slicing the belt "texture" into many small "quads" and then using the affine transformation feature introduced in R 4.2 to project these quads around the peg doll pawns as a circular "mesh".

@coolbutuseless

@jonocarroll also, 21 books is insane! I'm on 3!

Rookie numbers (although it is easier to rack up a bunch of "books read" if you track the picture books read to your young children although last year Goodreads says I still managed to read a respectable 22,324 pages in total although that pales to how many pages I was reading pre-kids).