On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
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...
If it was easy it would have been done along time ago. And what does
multi-core have to do with Python style threading? Nothing of course
...
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.
Yes, concurrent threading as available in Pyton is useful. Is is
useful enough to justify the effort of those who are going to end up
doing the work (given that there are other things we could also be
working on)? That is not clear.
Best,
luke
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
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Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
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