New error: cleanup_makevar(old) : argument "RMU" is missing, with no default

[Caroline_King]

Hi @stevebronder, thanks for working on this. Any idea when this might be fixed? I’ve tried renaming my Makevars file, and tried installing the 2.2.0 version of withr (certainly could have incorrectly done either of these steps), but still getting this error. Thanks!

[Caroline_King]

Nevermind- was able to get this by reinstalling stan from CRAN and then reinstalling withr v.2.2.0. And, thanks @stevebronder for the work you do to support stan!

[jonah]

@Caroline_King sorry for the inconvenience, but glad it’s working now!

[MatteoSeba]

Hi, I am trying to install older versions of withr but either I do it with this command or from CRAN I get the following message : Error: ‘\R’ is an unrecognized escape in character string starting "“C:\R”
Execution halted.

Why does it occur? Any suggestion?

[zcai]

Thanks for the solution. It worked for me, however, there is still this warning, it’s funny shouldn’t it be mingw_64 rather than mingw_? Could you please help.

Warning messages:
1: In system(paste(CXX, ARGS), ignore.stdout = TRUE, ignore.stderr = TRUE) :
 'C:/rtools40/usr/mingw_/bin/g++' not found

[ebuhle]

I’m running rstan 2.21.2 (CRAN version) in R 4.0.3 on Windows and I got the error described in this thread. Rolling back to withr 2.2.0 fixed it, but now I have a different problem. When I call stan_model(), not only does the resulting model not use the flags in my Makevars.win, but the Makevars.win file is actually deleted. I’ve tried restoring it, but it gets deleted again every time.

I’m wondering if this behavior is somehow related to this:

@stevebronder

It’s an odd error because its coming from the function here to cleanup any changes to the local makevars.

I don’t have -march=native in my Makevars. Based on this advice, it looks like:

CXX14FLAGS = -mtune=native -O3 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -mssse3 -msse4.1 -msse4.2

Calling get_cxxflags() on the stanmodel returns:

CXXFLAGS = -O2 -Wall $(DEBUGFLAG) -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -mstackrealign

Any idea what’s going on and how to fix it?

Sorry if this issue has been covered somewhere; I’m a little lost with all the R 4.0-related threads. Thanks in advance!

[stevebronder]

Sorry that your having this issue, your saying it completely deletes the file? I’m waiting for the below to get merged which should hopefully fix this issue

remove withr and make -march=native in makevars a warning on windows

[ebuhle]

Yep, it completely deletes Makevars.win. If I call stan() instead of stan_model(), it doesn’t delete the file but get_cxxflags() still returns the same defaults I showed above, rather than the contents of Makevars.win. It’s not fatal, but obviously I’d prefer the stanmodel to be optimized for speed.

I actually just perused that PR. If you could let us know in this thread when it’s merged, that would be swell. Thanks for working on this, and for such a rapid reply!

[x_y]

This tip “remotes::install_version(“withr”, “2.2.0”)” helped me install rstan correctly after spending hours trying to reinstall and install packages! Amazing and thank you so much!

[jonah]

@x_y

after spending hours trying to reinstall and install packages

Sorry it was such a hassle but I’m glad to hear it’s working now!

[jonah]

@andrjohns

file.rename("~/.R/Makevars.win", "~/.R/Makevars.win.bak")

@andrjohns @stevebronder Does this solution people are using result in many people having Stan run a lot slower that it can (e.g., because Makevars had -O3 etc.)? Checking on this because it was just reported again on github and the person solved it using this method.

[stevebronder]

Is this still an issue with the latest version on github? I merged a PR that should have fixed this

[stevebronder]

@jonah

Does this solution people are using result in many people having Stan run a lot slower that it can (e.g., because Makevars had -O3 etc.)? Checking on this because it was just reported again on github and the person solved it using this method.

Yeah it will run slower because we are missing -O3.

[jonah]

@stevebronder

Is this still an issue with the latest version on github? I merged a PR that should have fixed this

Probably fixed on github installing from source but there hasn’t been a release in a while so people installing the latest CRAN release are still encountering this.

@stevebronder So I guess the best option for now is encouraging people to keep their makevars but install from github?

[stevebronder]

Yeah I think so, would it be possible to have a bugfix release of rstan for this?

[jonah]

@stevebronder

would it be possible to have a bugfix release of rstan for this?

That would be a good idea. @bgoodri?

[schwa021]

I guess this is a bit of an old issue - but just confirming that I had this error, and the above fix (file.rename etc…) WORKED for me too.

[jonah]

Thanks for letting us know. Glad that fixed it for you.

[andrjohns]

While that fix will work, your models will run slower (since they’re no longer being optimised by the compiler).

Instead, if you follow the instructions here: https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan/wiki/Configuring-C---Toolchain-for-Windows#makevars-configuration

You’ll get the optimisations working. You just need to make sure that you don’t update the withr package after doing so

[strengejacke]

I don’t know why, but my Makevars.win looks like this:

CXX14FLAGS=-O3 -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-unused-function
CXX14 = $(BINPREF)g++ -m$(WIN) -std=c++1y
CXX11FLAGS=-O3 -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-unused-function

Since this configuration worked well in the past, I decided to go back to withr 2.2.0.