[Rd] need help debugging on Windows

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:26:35 -0400, "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com>
wrote :

>Dear R-devel,
>
>Apologies for bothering y'all with this seemingly perennial question.  A
>user reported problem with my most recent version of randomForest (4.4-1),
>and I was able to reproduce it with his data with R-2.0.0 patched
>(2004-10-24) on WinXP Pro.  The problem is that it crashes R on Windows.
>However, it does not happen on Linux (tried SUSE ES8 on our Opterons and
>Quantian on my laptop).  On Linux, the memory usage for the R process goes
>up to about 130MB and stays there.  On Windows, the memory usage would
>increase as the number of trees are grown (which already seem strange, as no
>more memory allocation is being done as the trees are grown), reaches about
>130MB, then starts to decline, and eventually crashes the Rgui (or Rterm)
>process.  
>
>My biggest problem is that I have not been able to get gdb to work under
>WinXPPro, thus I've been relying on Linux for debugging.  This time I'm
>really baffled, as the problem does not appear on Linux.  Can anyone provide
>any hint/pointer?  I (and my hair) will be very, very grateful!

No idea what's going wrong in randomForest, but I've got some hints
for debugging on

 http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR

I've found both the MinGW and Cygwin versions of gdb work, and use it
under insight.  It's rather painful compared to other Windows
debuggers, but it does the job.  I've never been able to get ddd
going.

Duncan Murdoch