On 4/13/19 12:05 PM, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
On Sat, 13 Apr 2019 at 03:51, Kevin Ushey <kevinus...@gmail.com> wrote:
I think it's worth saying that mclapply() works as documented
Mostly, yes. But it says nothing about fork's copy-on-write and memory
overcommitment, and that this means that it may work nicely or fail
spectacularly depending on whether, e.g., you operate on a long
vector.
R cannot possibly replicate documentation of the underlying operating
systems. It clearly says that fork() is used and readers who may not
know what fork() is need to learn it from external sources.
Copy-on-write is an elementary property of fork().
Reimplementing mclapply to use PSOCK does not make sense -- if someone
wants to write code that can be used both with PSOCK and FORK, there is
the cluster API in parallel for that.
Tomas
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