Parallel R expression evaluations

Jai,

On Oct 19, 2013, at 1:37 AM, JaiReddy wrote:

Thanks Simon.

May I know how R works if two expressions come at the same time for
evaluation. When I debug my case I found that issue was found with indexed
values of protected items. 

As R is single threaded engine, I just want to know how does R behave when
2nd expression comes for parsing and evaluation even before 1st expression
evaluation does complete?

As I said, no API calls may be performed in parallel, that includes parsing and evaluation. Typically, R is run in a sequential loop: read, parse, eval, print so anything that is not processed is blocked until the loop is back to reading. However, given that R can be called from arbitrary front-ends, it's really up to the front-end to decide what to do - as long as it serializes the calls appropriately.

Things like GUI callbacks can get evaluated while other evaluation is in progress. In that case, a stack discipline is maintained, i.e. expression1 does not continue until expression2 is evaluated, but expression3 may arrive and block the other two. This isn't really much different from what happens if expression1 encounters an object that requires lazy evaluation. If the intermittent calls have no side effects, or at least keep them within a well-defined universe, the interrupted call should be unaffected.

However, this will not happen while expression1 is evaluating C code, only when the R evaluator is called. 

-pd
Cheers,
Simon

Thanks
Jai

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Parallel R expression evaluations

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