On Mon, 15 Apr 2019 at 08:44, Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalib...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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().
Just to be precise, copy-on-write is an optimization widely deployed in most modern *nixes, particularly for the architectures in which R usually runs. But it is not an elementary property; it is not even possible without an MMU. -- Iñaki Úcar ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
