> But it still remains to be seen whether the extra work to introduce > threads is warranted. Will people actually use them in R and will it > have a significant impact on the computations or simply make writing > GUIs within R slightly easier to manage?
If threads can be set up easily, why not? Now that multi-core machines are becoming more easily available... It is not just about reducing computation time, btw. Not so long ago, I was setting up a system in Matlab to do concurrent sampling of a DAQ and an eye-tracker, and to show and record the sampled data. The DAQ toolbox fires off its own thread that does the actual sampling and can be configured to call a Matlab callback function at a predetermined interval. The eye-tracker code is single-threaded. If Matlab had been threadable, I'd have been able to sample the tracker in a different thread, and not miss out on the data coming in while plotting. > One of the reasons I am hesitant to use Python as a framework on > which to build a new system is the "thread-safe but not threadable" > issue. Also, it is not easily extensible in an object oriented manner Well, I didn't mean to suggest that it would the perfect solution. It seemed like a potentially worthwhile, feasible temporary solution that would allow at least some multithreading. I don't see how it is not easily extensible in an OO manner, though. The Python threads I use *are* objects (and very similar apparently to Java's threading model). Best, René ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
