[ESS] Emacs freezes upon 'Starting evaluation'

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 6:59 AM, Stephen Eglen <sje30 at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Paul Metzner <paul.metzner <at> gmail.com> writes:

>> It loops through a list of data frames with a multicore lapply and merges each
>> data frame with another data frame. The resulting data frames are put together
>> into one big data frame with rbind. But like I said, sometimes the code runs
>> perfectly, sometimes it doesn't.
>
> Following up on this email from late last year, I had the same problem recently.
> I thought initially ESS was at fault when I tried something simple like
>
> mclapply(1:10, rnorm)
>
> within an *R* buffer.  Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it hung, and no amount
> of C-g helped.  Trying this in a terminal (not Emacs) also showed the same
> problem, so ESS was not at fault.
>
> It turns out that I'd loaded tcltk, which is known to interfere with mclapply
> and friends.
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-hpc/2009-August/000324.html
>

I'm glad to know you tracked the problem to tcltk. I was disappointed
by this one and put in a bug on r-project.org.

https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15040

To me, it is just another sign that developing with tcltk is not wise,
and I wish somebody who really knows the details would tell me "Don't
worry, we are going to use GTK/Wx/... and you can count on that one."

pj


> Solution of not loading tcltk in a fresh session solved my problem.
>
> Stephen
>
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-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
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