Enable the use of Instruments from the command line with R

instruments-cli-R.md

Enable use of Instruments from the command line with R

First, the time profiler template has a space in it, which breaks when called from R, so we need to add sym link to it that doesn't have a space.

cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Instruments.app/Contents/Resources/templates
sudo ln -s 'Time Profiler.tracetemplate' 'time-profiler.tracetemplate'

Then, we need to workaround R being a little too helpful when passing arguments with -d, so we need to comment out those lines. e.g. apply the following diff to /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/bin/R

--- 3.5/Resources/bin/R	2019-03-13 10:40:24.000000000 -0400
+++ 3.6/Resources/bin/R	2019-12-19 14:47:40.000000000 -0500
@@ -278,15 +280,15 @@
       args_ok=yes
       ;;
   esac
-  if test -n "${args}${*}" && test "${args_ok}" = no; then
-    args=`expr "${args} ${*}" : " *\(.*\)"`
-    echo "*** Further command line arguments ('${args}') disregarded"
-    echo "*** (maybe use 'run ${args}' from *inside* ${debugger})"
-    echo ""
-    exec ${debugger} ${debugger_args} "${R_binary}"
-  else
+  #if test -n "${args}${*}" && test "${args_ok}" = no; then
+    #args=`expr "${args} ${*}" : " *\(.*\)"`
+    #echo "*** Further command line arguments ('${args}') disregarded"
+    #echo "*** (maybe use 'run ${args}' from *inside* ${debugger})"
+    #echo ""
+    #exec ${debugger} ${debugger_args} "${R_binary}"
+  #else
     exec ${debugger} ${debugger_args} "${R_binary}" ${args} "${@}"
-  fi
+  #fi
 fi
 
 ### Local Variables: ***

After those two steps you can run instruments on a file 'script.R' with the following command

R -d instruments --debugger-args="-t time-profiler" --vanilla -f script.R

This will generate a new directory instrumentscli0.trace, with the number incremented as needed.

You can open the trace in Instruments with open instrumentscli0.trace