[Rd] RProfmem output format

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 1:02 AM, Hadley Wickham <hadley at rice.edu> wrote:
> So what causes allocations when the call stack is empty?  Something
> internal?  Does the garbage collector trigger allocations (i.e. could
> it be caused by moving data to contiguous memory)?

The garbage collector doesn't move anything, it just swaps pointers in
a linked list.

The lexer, parser, and evaluator all have  to do some work before a
function context is set up for the top-level function, so I assume
that's where it is happening.

> Any ideas what the correct thing to do with these memory allocations?
> Ignore them because they're not really related to the function they're
> attributed to?  Sum them up?
>
>> I don't see why this is done, and I may well be the person who did it
>> (I don't have svn on this computer to check), but it is clearly
>> deliberate.
>
> It seems like it would be more consistent to always print a newline,
> and then it would obvious those allocations occurred when the call
> stack was empty.  This would make parsing the file a little bit
> easier.

Yes. It's obviously better to always print a newline, and so clearly
deliberate not to, that I suspect there may have been a good reason.
If I can't work it out (after my grant deadline this week) I will just
assume it's wrong.


   -thomas

-- 
Thomas Lumley
Professor of Biostatistics
University of Auckland