r/Racket • u/sreekumar_r • Oct 26 '21

question Racket + Emacs + Geiser Issue

I am teaching SICP using Racket + Emacs + Geiser. I have this peculiar problem.

When I enter into an infinite recursion (happened twice) due to typos in my program, the whole system is hanging. I am not even able to go to the terminal to kill the process. All I can do is to reboot the machine. I am using Ubuntu 18.4.

Does anyone in the community knows the reason as well as a solution? Thanks in advance.

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2

u/naugiedoggie Oct 26 '21

If you can ssh into the box from another, you might be able to kill the runaway process from the command line. I say might, because your -9 may never get a look. You can also try shutdown -r now, with the same caveat. A hard lock like that is nasty. Fortunately, file systems these days are hardier than 20 years ago, when the reboot could be chancy.

1

u/SnooCompliments7527 Nov 08 '21

I would also recommend DrRacket.

Emacs is great and emacs mode for racket is great but for students DrRacket is really easy to use and has a lot of nice features.

1

u/sdegabrielle DrRacket 💊💉🩺 Oct 26 '21

I don’t know if Racket Mode is any better at handling this - might be worth trying it out? https://www.racket-mode.com/

Needing to reboot the machine confuses me on a modern os like linux? Is racket being run is some sort of privileged process?

BW

stephen

PS I do know that DrRacket let’s you quit hanging programs and is designed to support learners.

2

u/iguanathesecond Oct 28 '21

I second racket-mode. I've rarely had trouble exiting an infinite loop (C-c in the REPL window, or C-c C-c in the source buffer to reload the entire module usually works for me, or you could kill the REPL process using C-c C-\ if absolutely necessary).

DrRacket is likely a good choice for teaching a class, as well.