Message-ID: <CAC2h7uuUmE0EzTeUcWfifgYuJv6tWXGoY-x1=1V9Rpm7b+ZGDw@mail.gmail.com>
Date: 2015-08-15T00:52:17Z
From: Kasper Daniel Hansen
Subject: Why not pthreads on Windows in 'parallel' package?
In-Reply-To: <CAFDcVCQO4b8ss08ZM_zXAp-4FAXL1dRj=9vRK6dB7hRSWivJGQ@mail.gmail.com>
mclapply uses fork which is different from pthreads. As I understand it,
pthreads requires you to rewrite code, fork is a system call which takes
care of completely replicating the current state of the process.
Kasper
On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson at ucsf.edu
> wrote:
> On Windows there are a few 'pthreads' implementation, e.g.
> pthreads-w32 and winpthreads
> [https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-exts.html#Using-pthreads
> ].
> We're thinking of giving them a try for the matrixStats package, and
> basic tests indicates it works, but since Windows pthreads are not
> used by core R (or?) I've got a little bit worried that we will face
> overwhelming problems.
>
> So, why are the above Windows implementations not used in the
> 'parallel' package in order to add multicore support for mclapply() on
> Windows? Was it tried but found to be unreliable? Was it that no one
> had the time to do it? License issues? Are there any pointers to old
> R-devel threads discussing this?
>
> Thanks
>
> Henrik
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]