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

Simon Urbanek simon.urbanek at r-project.org
Tue Feb 12 21:46:37 CET 2008


ESS can always do that because it's running in a separate process and  
hence has a separate event loop.

Cheers,
Simon

On Feb 12, 2008, at 3:11 PM, John Maindonald wrote:

> 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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>>
>
>
>



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