What are productive ways to debug Rcpp compiled code loaded in R (on OS X Mavericks)?

Question

What is the most productive and quickest way to debug shared objects that are loaded into R, in particular on OS X Mavericks? I\'m primarily interested in debugging compile

Answer 1

This is tough. I tried Xcode and Eclipse with a standalone C++ application, but it was so difficult to get all the headers and libraries working. Furthermore, the RcppExport code calls your real R function through a pointer which seemed to really confuse Xcode, and I couldn't step into my function.

I ended up with (gdb or lldb): In R: R -d lldb In debugger, set breakpoint: b functionName run In R: .Call(etc) # or just call your R code which invokes compiled C/C++ code Then back in debugger once break happens, you can step, examine frames, etc.

This lldb/gdb command quick reference helped a lot.

Forget about trying to do this in a GUI at this point. Hopefully Rstudio will get this going.

Answer 2

To debug simple Rcpp scripts like this, one thing you can do is create a .cpp application (with a main) that embeds R. This way you can debug it directly with Xcode which will give you a good debugging experience.

It gets more complicate when you start to want to debug packages.