The Art of R Programming

Running GDB on R Itself

This section may be of interest to you even if you are not trying to fix a bug in R. For example, you may have written some C code to interface to R (covered in Chapter 15) and found it to be buggy. In order to run GDB on that C function, you must first run R itself through GDB.

Or, you may be interested in the internals of R, say to determine how you can write efficient R code, and wish to explore the internals by stepping through the R source code with a debugging tool such as GDB.

Although you can invoke R through GDB from a shell command line (see Section 15.1.4), for our purposes here, I suggest using separate windows for R and GDB. Here’s the procedure:

1. Start R in one window, as usual.

2. In another window, determine ...