[R-SIG-Mac] hang on use of ESC in R 2.6.2

[John Maindonald]

Will it be possible for ESS to do the same?  I guess this is more general
than Mac, but it seems worth asking here at this point.
John Maindonald

> [I have replied privately, but here is the relevant part of the
> response for the list:]
>
> If R is stuck in a long computation in C code that doesn't call
> R_ProcessEvents, we're helpless. There is no way to stop that code
> until it finishes. Even if you press <Esc> it may not help (just give
> you the beachball), because the event of you pressing <Esc> must first
> be processed so it can fire, but if R is already somewhere in a C
> code, so it will never get processed, hence the beachball (on OS X the
> beachball means that the application doesn't process events for some
> time).
>
> Now, you can debug this if you desire so to find out what R is doing.
> To do so, start a Terminal (in parallel to your unresponsive R) and
> type:
> gdb
> attach R
>
> That should get you into the R process that is spinning. Now you can
> issue
> bt
> to see where it really is. Very likely it will be somewhere is the
> package performing the computation. But if it's not, then we want to
> know.
>
> Anyway, I suspect that this is not really something we can do much
> about (in the current GUI). The new GUI 2.0 is running R in a separate
> thread, so it is always responsive despite R being busy, hence we can
> deal better with unresponsive R there.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
> On Feb 10, 2008, at 10:53 AM, Ken Knoblauch wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I notice with R 2.6.2 on a powerpc and on a MacBook Pro that if I
>> hit ESC to
>> annul running a line in the GUI, input hangs with the spinning beach
>> ball
>> for an indefinite period of time.  I haven't tried to see how long
>> it will
>> hang, but
>> it is at least several minutes too long.  Checking Force Quit
>> indicates that
>> R is not responding.
>>
>> On the power pc, w/ Tiger (but the same thing happens on my Intel
>> Mac w/
>> Leopard)
>> sessionInfo()
>> R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08)
>> powerpc-apple-darwin8.10.1
>>
>> locale:
>> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>>
>> attached base packages:
>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Ken
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ken Knoblauch
>> Inserm U846
>> Institut Cellule Souche et Cerveau
>> Département Neurosciences Intégratives
>> 18 avenue du Doyen Lépine
>> 69500 Bron
>> France
>> tel: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 77
>> fax: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 61
>> portable: +33 (0)6 84 10 64 10
>> http://www.sbri.fr
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
>> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>>
>>
>
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