Can't install; multiple compilation error messages

[DrAndiLowe]

install.packages("ranger")
Installing package into ‘/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/ranger_0.2.7.tar.gz'

Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 50771 bytes (49 KB)

downloaded 49 KB

• installing source package ‘ranger’ ...
  ** package ‘ranger’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
  ** libs
  g++ -std=c++0x -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I"/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/Rcpp/include" -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c Data.cpp -o Data.o
  g++ -std=c++0x -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I"/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/Rcpp/include" -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c DataChar.cpp -o DataChar.o
  g++ -std=c++0x -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I"/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/Rcpp/include" -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c DataDouble.cpp -o DataDouble.o
  g++ -std=c++0x -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I"/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/Rcpp/include" -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c DataFloat.cpp -o DataFloat.o
  g++ -std=c++0x -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I"/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/Rcpp/include" -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c Forest.cpp -o Forest.o
  Forest.cpp: In member function ‘void Forest::showProgress(std::string)’:
  Forest.cpp:657:22: error: ‘std::chrono::steady_clock’ has not been declared
  Forest.cpp:661:3: error: ‘steady_clock’ has not been declared
  Forest.cpp:661:28: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘start_time’
  Forest.cpp:662:3: error: ‘steady_clock’ has not been declared
  Forest.cpp:662:28: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘last_time’
  Forest.cpp:668:51: error: ‘steady_clock’ has not been declared
  Forest.cpp:668:73: error: ‘last_time’ was not declared in this scope
  Forest.cpp:672:56: error: ‘steady_clock’ has not been declared
  Forest.cpp:672:78: error: ‘start_time’ was not declared in this scope
  Forest.cpp:676:19: error: ‘steady_clock’ has not been declared
  make: *** [Forest.o] Error 1
  ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘ranger’
• removing ‘/home/andy/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/ranger’
  Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘ranger’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/RtmpBv2B7n/downloaded_packages’

devtools::session_info()
Session info ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
setting value
version R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
system i686, linux-gnu
ui RStudio (0.99.446)
language (EN)
collate en_US.UTF-8
tz
date 2015-09-23

Packages -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package * version date source
Boruta * 4.0.0 2014-12-07 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
curl 0.9.3 2015-08-25 CRAN (R 3.2.1)
devtools * 1.9.1 2015-09-11 CRAN (R 3.2.2)
digest 0.6.8 2014-12-31 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
httr 1.0.0 2015-06-25 CRAN (R 3.2.1)
magrittr 1.5 2014-11-22 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
memoise 0.2.1 2014-04-22 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
R6 2.1.1 2015-08-19 CRAN (R 3.2.1)
randomForest * 4.6-10 2014-07-17 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
rFerns * 1.1.0 2014-11-30 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
stringi 0.5-5 2015-06-29 CRAN (R 3.2.1)
stringr 1.0.0 2015-04-30 CRAN (R 3.2.1)

sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu precise (12.04.5 LTS)

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
[4] LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C LC_ADDRESS=C
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages:
[1] devtools_1.9.1 Boruta_4.0.0 rFerns_1.1.0 randomForest_4.6-10

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] httr_1.0.0 R6_2.1.1 magrittr_1.5 tools_3.2.2
[5] rstudioapi_0.3.1 curl_0.9.3 memoise_0.2.1 stringi_0.5-5
[9] stringr_1.0.0 digest_0.6.8

[mnwright]

Your gcc version is too old to support C++11. You will need to upgrade to 4.7 or newer.

@ALL: Any idea how to check for this and throw an error?

[mnwright]

This works, but:

Found the following file(s) containing GNU extensions:
src/Makevars
Portable Makefiles do not use GNU extensions such as +=, :=, $(shell),
$(wildcard), ifeq ... endif. See section ‘Writing portable packages’ in
the ‘Writing R Extensions’ manual.

[mnwright]

New approach: Use std=c++11 flag instead of CXX_STD = CXX11, should work on gcc >=4.7 and throw an error on earlier versions. But this time:

Non-portable flags in variable 'PKG_CPPFLAGS':
-std=c++11

[mnwright]

And one more approach: Created a cpp file checking for the preprocessor directive "__cplusplus". Seems to work.