[plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme

From: Robby Findler (robby at cs.uchicago.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 5 12:37:38 EDT 2008

Well, its a known fact of life when dealing with software that is
using more than the available memory on the system. I'm sure there are
better and worse strategies for dealing with that, some of which could
be improved in drscheme and some of which would have to be done at the
windows level.

Robby

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Jos Koot <jos.koot at telefonica.net> wrote:
> You said "The entire system has problems" That's true. Even after a
> succesfull stop and leaving DrScheme, my system may continue thrashing for
> some time. It may very well be a Windows problem rather than a PLT problem.
> I don't know.
> Jos
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robby Findler" <robby at cs.uchicago.edu>
> To: "Jos Koot" <jos.koot at telefonica.net>
> Cc: "Matthias Felleisen" <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>; "budu"
> <nbuduroi at gmail.com>; <plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 6:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme
>
>
>> Yes, I've had that experience too. I find that the keyboard is a
>> little bit more reliable, but in general when thrashing is going on,
>> the entire system has problems.
>>
>> Do you find that this is happening when you're using the memory limits?
>>
>> Robby
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Jos Koot <jos.koot at telefonica.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> As you probably know, I am addicted to PLT Scheme, its IDE included.
>>> I hate typing shell commands. With PLT's IDE I can avoid those commands..
>>> Allow me to mention, though, that the stop button does not easily
>>> (sometimes
>>> not at all) repond when the garbage collector is thrashing.
>>> This is no problem for me, but may be you want to know.
>>> (This pertains to Windows XP Home and to all versions of DrScheme I ever
>>> downloaded and to pretty-big, #lang scheme, #!r6rs and more.)
>>> Jos
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthias Felleisen"
>>> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>
>>> To: "budu" <nbuduroi at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: <plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu>
>>> Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 3:19 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, unlike all other "pedagogic" IDEs, DrScheme has a reliable STOP
>>>> button for infinite loops. (It's possible that others have caught up,
>>>> but I
>>>> am sure we were first.)
>>>>
>>>> Furthermore, you can and should set the memory limit for REPLs so  that
>>>> the memory limit for the REPL thread is distinct from the memory  limit
>>>> for
>>>> the whole system and doesn't take it down. You need to  teach both ideas
>>>> to
>>>> beginners eventually: computations consume space,  and infinite
>>>> computations
>>>> consume unbounded space, plus you as a  programmer should learn to set
>>>> the
>>>> limits in your context.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the feedback -- Matthias
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Jul 4, 2008, at 10:43 AM, budu wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi, I'm an occasional DrScheme user (normally I use Emacs) and there
>>>>> is some little things I don't like about it. One is keyboard
>>>>> shortcuts, which I never been able to change. I found out recently
>>>>> about the "Enable keybindings in menus" options, it's great, but I'm
>>>>> still missing some of my favorite shortcuts, mainly C-j for newline.
>>>>> Maybe the answer lies into the Help Desk, but it totally confuse me,
>>>>> it seems like I'm never able to find what I'm searching for.
>>>>>
>>>>> The bigger issue now is about DrScheme not being as solid as I'd like
>>>>> it to be. Maybe I'm too much used to Emacs, because when I use its
>>>>> REPL it never crash no matter what. I've lost some code (without any
>>>>> importance) this morning because I did try to run a function that
>>>>> generate an infinite loop and it crashed DrScheme with an out of
>>>>> memory exception. When considering that this IDE is geared toward
>>>>> beginners, I find it strange that it can't sustain even a mere
>>>>> infinite loop. Maybe that's the price to pay for the great debugging
>>>>> features DrSceme have.
>>>>>
>>>>> BTW, I'm a little late for this but congratulation to the PLT devs for
>>>>> version 4, it's a really great release.
>>>>>
>>>>> _________________________________________________
>>>>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>>>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>>>
>>>> _________________________________________________
>>>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________
>>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>>
>>>
>
>
>


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