GDB for R?

[Andrew Hoerner <towardvictory at gmail dot com>]

Dear Folks--

I would very much like to know if there is any appreciable probability that
there will be a GDB debugger for the R language in a time frame of months
to single-digit years. I’d also like to know if there is pretty clearly no
such probability.

It seems clear to me that GDB is vastly more powerful than any R debugging
facility in widespread use.

I do not believe that there is anyone in the R community currently working
on this, and I have asked in several places. Still, I don’t know anything
at all about nearly all R projects currently under development. I have
found instances and tutorials on using GDB on C and C++ code, functions,
and libraries that are incorporated into or called by R, which I believe
suggests the possibility of substantial interest and uptake, though this
might be reduced by the relatively small proportion of R users who are
professional programmers.

The draft 2nd edition of Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R, Chapter 20 on
debugging, states “The worst scenario is that your code might crash R
completely, leaving you with no way to interactively debug your code. This
indicates a bug in the underlying C code. This is hard to debug. Sometimes
an interactive debugger, like gdb, can be useful, but describing how to use
it is beyond the scope of this book."

Warmest regards, Andrew Hoerner