Better Stack Trace for R

R has long suffered from poor stack tracing capabilities. This package aims to make the situation slightly better by providing more details when errors occur.

For example, if we have a file "/Users/robertk/tmp/foo.R",

# /Users/robertk/tmp/foo.R
foo <- function() { bar() + 1 }
bar <- function() { baz() + 2 }

then sourcing and calling foo gives

# R console
source("~/tmp/foo.R")
foo()
# Error in bar() : could not find function "baz"
# In global environment: foo()
# In /Users/robertk/tmp/foo.R:1: bar() + 1
# In /Users/robertk/tmp/foo.R:2: baz() + 2
# 
# could not find function "baz"

This is much more informative than the built-in message:

> foo()
Error in bar() : could not find function "baz"

Installation

This package is not yet available from CRAN (as of April 2, 2015). To install the latest development builds directly from GitHub, run this instead:

if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("robertzk/bettertrace")
library(bettertrace) # options(error = bettertrace::stacktrace) will be set