RStudio (or Positron) on ARM for Windows?

General
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Is there a release of RStudio or Positron planned for Windows on ARM? And if so, is there a timeline for this?

Would appreciate feedback--I'm deciding on a new laptop and this is a major factor in the decision.

For anyone else coming across this post:

(Also, the question was previously asked 14 months ago:
https://forum.posit.co/t/does-rstudio-work-on-windows-on-arm-arm64-laptop/197290)

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As far as I can tell you can download an experimental build from the usual place at Releases · posit-dev/positron · GitHub

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I'm also curious about this. Let me extend the question a little to what works while waiting for a native version. Any experience using current versions of RStudio on an ARM for Windows machine? Actually, same question about R as well as RStudio.

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Hi Richard. I am presently using the latest x86 builds of both R and RStudio on a Windows 11 Pro laptop with an ARM CPU (Snapdragon X). It runs them via emulation, as it does with any other x86 software. So far it works just fine.

I have also installed ARM versions of both (Ubuntu) to run under WSL using the workaround which I linked earlier, but have yet to set that up properly.

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That's very helpful. Do you have any sense of whether the emulation slows down R significantly?

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My highly subjective answer: so far, I'm not feeling like it's that much of a problem. Inevitable caveats: I haven't done any heavy modelling or similarly CPU-intensive tasks so far, and I haven't yet got the native ARM setup running so I don't even have a subjective comparison. Further, I would tend to do seriously CPU-intensive tasks on a remote VM, so I doubt that it will become a problem for me in practice.

If you are contemplating the purchase of a Windows on ARM computer and this is a sticking point--for me, I wouldn't let it stop me (the battery life is wonderful).

I am hoping that we get (latest-release) versions of R and RStudio for ARM soon enough that this question becomes obsolete ..

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R has aarch64 Windows builds, CRAN used to put them at Index of /nosvn/winutf8/aarch64/R-4-signed.

They are not building new ones, though, but R-hub builds them and puts them at Releases · r-hub/R · GitHub. R-devel and R-next (patched, alpha, etc) builds are also available there. Note, however, that these builds are not signed currently.

You can also install them with rig (GitHub - r-lib/rig: The R Installation Manager · GitHub), alhough rig does not support x86_64 builds on aarch64.

Btw. Positron also has aarch64 Windows builds I think, so if you don't mind switching to Positron, you can have a nice native toolchain.

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@Gabor -- thank you! I knew about the older aarch64 R builds on CRAN, but not about the up-to-date unsigned builds on R-hub; I will try 4.6. I do wonder, though, about the packages, i.e. can I use x86-compiled packages with aarch64 base R. I guess we'll see.

Positron does indeed have an aarch64 build for Windows. I have downloaded it, but am yet to start using it.

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You cannot. You need to compile packages from source, I am afraid, so you also need Rtools for aarch64 windows. (rig can also install this for you I believe.)

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