Foreach (doMC)
Dear list members, dear Jay, Well, I personally do not care about Revolutions Analytics selling their products as this is also included into the idea of many open source licences. Especially as Revolutions provide their packages to the community and its is everybodies personal choice to buy their special R version. I was just wondering about this issue as usually most questions on r-help are answered pretty soon and by many different people and I had the impression that this is not the case for posts regarding the foreach/doMC/doSMP etc packages. This may, however, be also due to the probably limited use of these packages for most users who do not need these high performance computing things. Or it was just my personal perception or pure chance. Thanks however, to the authors of such packages! They were of great help to me on several ocasions and I have deep respect for everybody devoting his time to open source software! Jannis
On 10/19/2011 01:26 PM, Jay Emerson wrote:
P.S. Is there any particular reason why there are so seldom answers to posts regarding foreach and all these doMC/doSMP packages ? Do so few people use these packages or does this have anything to do with the commercial origin of these packages?
Jannis, An interesting question. I'm a huge fan of foreach and the parallel backends, and have used foreach in some of my packages. It leaves the choice of backend to the user, rather than forcing some environment. If you like multicore, great -- the package doesn't care. Someone else may use doSNOW. No problem. To answer your question, foreach was originally written by (primarily, at least) Steve Weston, previously of REvolution Computing. It, along with some of the parallel backends (perhaps all at this point, I'm out of touch) are available open-source. Hence, I'd argue that the "commercial origin" is a moot point -- it doesn't matter, it will always be available, and it's really useful. Steve is no longer with REvolution, however, and I can't speak for the responsiveness/interest of current REvolution folks on this point. Scanning R-help daily for things relating to my own packages is something I try to do, but it doesn't always happen. I would like to think foreach is widely used -- it does have a growing list of reverse depends/suggests. And was updated as recently as last May, I just noticed. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html Jay