[R] Foreach (doMC)

[Jannis]

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
>