RcppThread
R-Friendly Threading in C++
Provides a C++11-style thread class and thread pool that can safely
be interrupted from R. See Nagler (2021)
Provides R-friendly threading functionality:
- thread safe versions of Rcpp's
checkUserInterrupt()andRcout, - 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
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
Add
// [[Rcpp::plugins(cpp11)]]// [[Rcpp::depends(RcppThread)]]
before including any headers in your source code.
in another R package
- Add the line
CXX_STD = CXX11to thesrc/Makevars(.win)files of your package. - Add
RcppThreadto theLinkingTofield of yourDESCRIPTIONfile.
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.
News
RcppThread 0.5.3
- Improved handling of exceptions thrown from threads.
RcppThread 0.5.2
-
Limit number of threads in unit tests.
-
Fixed typos in package vignette.
RcppThread 0.5.1
BUG FIXES
-
Fix portability issues related to
native_handle_type. -
Fix signed/unsigned comparison in
parallelFor(). -
Fix signed/unsigned warnings in unit tests.
RcppThread 0.5.0
DEPENDENCIES
- Rcpp is no longer a hard dependency, but only used for unit tests. This avoids unneccessary compilation time during package installation.
NEW FEATURES
-
New vignette available, see
browseVignettes("RcppThread"). -
New functions
parallelFor()andForEach()allowing parallelforloops with load balancing. Can also be called as method of aThreadPool. -
Options to override
std::threadandstd::coutwith RcppThread equivalents using preprocessor variablesRCPPTHREAD_OVERRIDE_THREADandRCPPTHREAD_OVERRIDE_COUT. -
Several minor performance optimizations.
RcppThread 0.4.0
NEW FEATURE
- New function
ThreadPool::map()that allows to map a function a list of items.
RcppThread 0.3.0
NEW FEATURE
- A
ThreadPoolcan now be intantiated with zero threads in the pool. It will then do all work pushed to it in the main thread.
RcppThread 0.2.0
NEW FEATURE
ThreadPoolhas a new methodwait()that waits for all jobs to be done without joining the threads. This way the thread pool can be re-used for different types of tasks that need to be run sequentially.
RcppThread 0.1.3
BUG FIX
- Don't check print ouptut of multi-threaded code b/c of random results.
RcppThread 0.1.2
DEPENDS
- Now available for
R (>= 3.3.0).
BUG FIX
- Fixed a randomly failing unit test.
RcppThread 0.1.1
BUG FIX
- Default initialize static
Rcoutinstance in header file (#9; couldn't link shared library on r-hub, see discussion in #8)
RcppThread 0.1.0
- Intial release.