Quatro rendering issue

[beauchatw-droid]

I have:

• searched the issue tracker for similar issues
• installed the latest version of Quarto CLI
• formatted my issue following the Bug Reports guide

Bug description

I have spent approximately six hours trying to resolve a Quarto rendering problem on a Windows 11 ARM64 machine (Microsoft Surface Laptop, Snapdragon X Elite).

Current state:

• RStudio launches normally.
• R loads normally.
• The R console works.
• Packages install successfully.
• R scripts run successfully.
• The only remaining issue is that Quarto will not render.

The error reported by Quarto is:

ERROR: R process crashed with known error code (-1073741569)

This typically indicates x64 R running on Windows 11 ARM.

During troubleshooting I have tried all of the following:

• Uninstalled and reinstalled R multiple times.
• Installed both the standard x64 version of R (4.6.1) and the native ARM64 version of R (4.5.3-aarch64).
• Uninstalled and reinstalled RStudio.
• Verified that R launches successfully from both RStudio and the Windows command prompt.
• Reinstalled all required R packages.
• Disabled Microsoft Defender Controlled Folder Access after it blocked R during installation.
• Forced RStudio to use different R installations via Ctrl startup and manual selection.
• Verified that R.exe, Rscript.exe, Rterm.exe, and Rcmd.exe are present.
• Verified that the machine architecture is ARM64.

At this point the R installation appears to function correctly. The failure occurs only when Quarto attempts to render a document.

Has anyone encountered this issue with Quarto on Windows 11 ARM64, or is there a known compatibility issue between Quarto and ARM64 Windows?

Steps to reproduce

No response

Actual behavior

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Your environment

No response

Quarto check output

==> quarto preview Class exercises (1).qmd --to docx --no-watch-inputs --no-browse

processing file: Class-exercises--1-.rmarkdown

output file: Class-exercises--1-.knit.md

ERROR: R process crashed with known error code (-1073741569).

This typically indicates x64 R running on Windows 11 ARM.
x64 R runs under emulation and is not reliable for Quarto.

To fix this issue:

1. Check your R version with: Rscript -e "R.version$platform"
2. If it shows 'x86_64-w64-mingw32', you need ARM64 R
3. Install native ARM64 R: https://blog.r-project.org/2024/04/23/r-on-64-bit-arm-windows/
4. If needed, set QUARTO_R environment variable to point to ARM64 Rscript

More context on this issue: #8730
Problem with running R found at C:\PROGRA2\R\R-451.3\bin\Rscript.exe to check environment configurations.
Please check your installation of R.

WARN: Error encountered when rendering files

[remlapmot]

This is not a Quarto bug, this is a bug in Windows on ARM x86_64 emulation. As the message explains this is caused by you using x86_64 R on Windows 11 on ARM and on that the emulation can't handle certain R packages. Even though scripts appear to run successfully with no error messages being shown in the R console, in fact the x86_64 R session returns a non-zero exit code when certain R packages are used (I don't know why).

So you've done the correct thing installing ARM64 version of R, but it doesn't look like your setup is picking that up correctly. Try adding the following 2 directories on your PATH (assuming you didn't change the default installation directory)

• C:\Program Files\R-aarch64\R-4.5.3\bin
• and the default path the RTools45 for ARM binaries C:\rtools45-aarch64\usr\bin - the installer for AARCH64 RTools45 is at https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools45/files/rtools45-aarch64-6768-6492.exe - you need this because all packages need to be built from source.
• And remove all directories related to x86_64 R and x86_64 RTools from PATH.

Your other options are:

• use a different computer (e.g., x86_64 Windows/Linux or a Mac), or if you can make your whole project public do the quarto rendering using a GitHub Actions workflow (choosing x86_64 Linux runner ubuntu-latest).
• Harder option - install Windows Subsystem for Linux on your machine - try ARM64 Ubuntu, then do the computation with R for ARM64 Linux - as Posit Package Manager and r-universe have binary packages for ARM64 Ubuntu Linux and there's an installer for Quarto on ARM64 Linux.

[cderv]

Thanks for the help @remlapmot !

@beauchatw-droid in addition to the above, check what quarto check tell you, and you can also set QUARTO_R to use a specific version of R. Be sure to point to ARM one.

However, I am seeing they stopped building for newest version... 🤔 That is a bummer.

I wonder if rig (https://github.com/r-lib/rig) can help install easily - not sure they support windows ARM yet though.

[beauchatw-droid]

Thanks! I will give a try!