[R] Foreach (doMC)

[Jay Emerson]

Jannis,

I'm not complete sure I understand your first point, but maybe someone
from REvolution will weigh in.  Nobody is forcing anyone to purchase
any products, and there are attractive alternatives such as the CRAN R
and R Studio (to name two).  This issue has arisen many times of the
various lists and you are welcome to search the archives and read many
very intelligent, thoughtful opinions.

As for foreach, etc... if you have fairly focused questions
(preferably with a reproducible example if there is a problem) and if
you have done reading on examples available on using it, then you
might try joining the r-sig-hpc at r-project.org group.  Clearly there
are far more users of "core" R and hence "mainstream" questions on
r-help are likely to be answered more quickly (on average) than
specialized questions.

Regards,

Jay

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Jannis <bt_jannis at yahoo.de> wrote:
> Dear list members, dear Jay,
>
> Well, I personally do not care about Revolutions Analytics selling their
> products as this is also included into the idea of many open source
> licences. Especially as Revolutions provide their packages to the community
> and its is everybodies personal choice to buy their special R version.
>
> I was just wondering about this issue as usually most questions on r-help
> are answered pretty soon and by many different people and I had the
> impression that this is not the case for posts regarding the
> foreach/doMC/doSMP etc packages. This may, however, be also due to the
> probably limited use of these packages for most users who do not need these
> high performance computing things. Or it was just my personal perception or
> pure chance.
>
> Thanks however, to the authors of such packages! They were of great help to
> me on several ocasions and I have deep respect for everybody devoting his
> time to open source software!
>
> Jannis
>
>
>
> On 10/19/2011 01:26 PM, Jay Emerson wrote:
>>>
>>> P.S. Is there any particular reason why there are so seldom answers to
>>> posts regarding foreach and all these doMC/doSMP packages ?  Do so few
>>> people use these packages or does this have anything to do with the
>>> commercial origin of these packages?
>>
>> Jannis,
>>
>> An interesting question.  I'm a huge fan of foreach and the parallel
>> backends, and have used foreach in some of my packages.  It leaves the
>> choice of backend to the user, rather than forcing some environment.
>> If you like multicore, great -- the package doesn't care.  Someone
>> else may use doSNOW.  No problem.
>>
>> To answer your question, foreach was originally written by (primarily,
>> at least) Steve Weston, previously of REvolution Computing.  It, along
>> with some of the parallel backends (perhaps all at this point, I'm out
>> of touch) are available open-source.  Hence, I'd argue that the
>> "commercial origin" is a moot point -- it doesn't matter, it will
>> always be available, and it's really useful.  Steve is no longer with
>> REvolution, however, and I can't speak for the responsiveness/interest
>> of current REvolution folks on this point.  Scanning R-help daily for
>> things relating to my own packages is something I try to do, but it
>> doesn't always happen.
>>
>> I would like to think foreach is widely used -- it does have a growing
>> list of reverse depends/suggests.  And was updated as recently as last
>> May, I just noticed.
>> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html
>>
>> Jay
>>
>
>



-- 
John W. Emerson (Jay)
Associate Professor of Statistics
Department of Statistics
Yale University
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay