[R-SIG-Mac] RAqua, Darwin/X11 R, and tcltk

[Simon Urbanek]

On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 06:05  PM, Jan de Leeuw wrote:

> What does not work:
> [...]

Since Jan is at it, I'll add my problem:

RAqua + Java doesn't work. What happens is that RAqua crashes with a 
segfault after a while (you don't even have to run any Java code except 
for initialization). Producing any system events in RAqua (clicking, 
moving windows etc. will do the trick) accelerates the process, i.e. it 
happens almost immediately. This is not really a fault of Java, but 
rather due to the RAqua design (imho). The entire solution of RAqua 
seems to me very 'hacked' (just to have something in time for 1.8) and 
I hope we can do much better.
The main problem here is that the event handling is incompatible with 
other applications. If you fire up Java, it needs to poll for system 
events as well. But since RAqua uses its own (unsynchronized) polling, 
the whole event system crashes. It is not a particular code (the crash 
is every time at a different location, mostly in a system thread i.e. 
outside R and Java), but rather a design issue.
I suspect that taking any OS X native application (e.g. Cocoa-based) 
will cause exactly the same problem - Java was just the first I saw to 
trigger this.
Running the same program in the console works fine (no wonder - no 
event polling there ;)).

Presumably most of the problems (except from the 
I'm-using-the-wrong-library-problem) posted by Jan will go away once we 
have the new event loop in R and everyone (incl. tcl/tk and aqua) uses 
it.

Since Jan was listing what doesn't work, I just wanted to let you know 
about it ;). I'm going to fiddle around with the event polling issue 
and see if it can be fixed.

Cheers,
Simon

---
Simon Urbanek
Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany

Tel: +49-821-598-2236
Fax: +49-821-598-2200

Simon.Urbanek at Math.Uni-Augsburg.de
http://simon.urbanek.info