R thread safe

Duncan Temple Lang wrote (Mon Nov 7 22:35:22 CET 2005):

R is not yet thread safe.
We are working on it, and I hope to make some progress before
the end of the year.  (This one even!)

D.

How is this going along?

For some things it would be simpler to use threads compared to
processes, to avoid the added complexity of passing the results back to
a master process.

With the emerging multicore processors it is essential that users can
easily make use of them.

A simple example of use:
  data1 <- data2 <- matrix(0, r, c)
  dataFiller <- function(i) {
   tmp <- someCalculation(i)
   data1[, i] <<- tmp$result1
   data2[, i] <<- tmp$result2
  }
  runParallelInThreads(1:c, dataFiller)

If this can be done almost as fast and simple with processes, for
instance using the multicore package, then I think it needs to be better
documented.

Regards
Rune Schjellerup Philosof