Hi Iñaki,
I think that "still reachable" memory is potentially a problem only if
you cared about (frequent) package unloading, and if package unloading
did not have correctness problems in the first place. I would only worry
about "memory leaks" reported by valgrind.
That your example (unloading a library while there is still an object
with a finalizer implemented in that library) segfaults on one system
but not another is not too surprising. Depending on the OS, the dynamic
linker, the current state of the system, etc - when the GC tries to run
the finalizer, it may point to inaccessible memory (segfault), but also
still to the code of the unloaded finalizer (possibly no segfault) or
something else. There is no way to distinguish between all these cases
before running the finalizer - neither the OS nor R can do it - we could
only in principle, with a lot of other problems and platform-dependent
hacks, detect when the memory is inaccessible, but that may not be worth it.
Best
Tomas
On 08/10/2018 12:46 AM, Iñaki Úcar wrote:
Thanks, Tomas, Luke, for the clarifications. Then, I have another question.
But first, let me introduce how I ended up here, because obviously I
just don't go around dyn.unloading things that I've just compiled. I
was testing a package with valgrind. Everything ok, no leaks. Great.
But I'm always suspicious (probably unjustifiably) of all the memory
that is reported as "still reachable", so I wanted to check whether
there was any difference if I detach(unload=TRUE) the package after
all the tests.
In a nutshell, I ended up discovering that the following code:
```
library(simmer)
simmer() # allocates a C++ object, as in my initial example
detach("package:simmer", unload=TRUE)
```
segfaults on Windows, but not on Linux (then I built the example in my
initial email to confirm it wasn't simmer's fault). So given that,
from your explanation, I should expect a segfault here, the question
is: what on Earth does (or does not) R on Linux do to avoid
segfaulting compared to Windows? :) And a corolary would be, can't R
on Windows do the same?
Regards,
Iñaki
El jue., 9 ago. 2018 a las 21:13, <luke-tier...@uiowa.edu> escribió:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2018, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 9 August 2018 at 20:37, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
| So to answer your original question, this could probably be handled in
| Rcpp,
Hm. Why do you say that / what did you have in mind?
We say it because it is true. Rcpp registers C finalizers and running
them after unloading will segfault. For now it would be better for Rcpp
(and everyone else) to explicitly discourage unloading as it is
unreliable on many levels.
What Rcpp could do to avoid segfaulting is to keep a weak list of all
objects to which it attaches C finalizers and arrange for those to be
cleaned up in an R_unload_<dllname> routine. Not clear it is worth the
trouble. At the R level we could provide more support for this since
we already have a weak list of objects with finalizers, but again not
clear it is worth the trouble.
Best,
luke
Recall that we do not alter SEXPs or introduce additional additional
reference counters -- because we do not think that altering the basic R API
for such calls would be a wise strategy. So we do more or less what is done
in C for R, with some additional hand-holding which circumvents a number of
common errors.
| but in either case I would not use dyn.unload() in the first
| place. This problem may be just one of many.
I think I'd second that. I never had much unloading packages or dynamic
libraries and tend to "just say no". Both short-lived processes (ie via 'r')
as well as long sessions (ie R via ESS, running for weeks) work for my
workflows.
Dirk
--
Luke Tierney
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke-tier...@uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
--
Iñaki Úcar
http://www.enchufa2.es
@Enchufa2
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