R-Friendly Threading in C++

Provides a C++11-style thread class and thread pool that can safely be interrupted from R; see, Nagler (2018) .

Provides R-friendly threading functionality:

• thread safe versions of Rcpp's checkUserInterrupt() and Rcout,
• an interruptible thread class that otherwise behaves like std::thread,
• classes for the thread pool pattern and parallel for loops for easy and flexible parallelism.

The library is header-only, platform-independent, and only requires a C++11-compatible compiler.

Functionality

For a detailed description of its functionality and examples, see the vignette or the API documentation.

Installation

Release version from CRAN:

install.packages("RcppThread")

Latest development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tnagler/RcppThread")

How to use it

with cppFunction

1. Pass "RcppThread" to the depends argument and "cpp11" to the plugins argument. For example:

   Rcpp::cppFunction('void func() { /* actual code here */ }', 
                          depends = "RcppThread", plugins = "cpp11")

with sourceCpp

1. Add

   // [[Rcpp::plugins(cpp11)]] 
   // [[Rcpp::depends(RcppThread)]] 

   before including any headers in your source code.

in another R package

1. Add the line CXX_STD = CXX11 to the src/Makevars(.win) files of your package.
2. Add RcppThread to the LinkingTo field of your DESCRIPTION file.

Automatic override of std::cout and std::thread

There are preprocessor options to replace all occurences of std::cout and std::thread with calls to RcppThread::Rcout and RcppThread::Thread (provided that the RcppThread headers are included first). To enable this, use

#define RCPPTHREAD_OVERRIDE_COUT 1    // std::cout override
#define RCPPTHREAD_OVERRIDE_THREAD 1  // std::thread override

before including the RcppThread headers.