Just throwing my two cents in: I think removing/deprecating fork would be a bad idea for two reasons:
1) There are no performant alternatives 2) Removing fork would break existing workflows Even if replaced with something using the same interface (e.g., a function that automatically detects variables to export as in the amazing `future` package), the lack of copy-on-write functionality would cause scripts everywhere to break. A simple example illustrating these two points: `x <- 5e8; mclapply(1:24, sum, x, 8)` Using fork, `mclapply` takes 5 seconds. Using "psock", `clusterApply` does not complete. Travers On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 2:32 AM Iñaki Ucar <iu...@fedoraproject.org> wrote: > > On Thu, 11 Apr 2019 at 22:07, Henrik Bengtsson > <henrik.bengts...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > ISSUE: > > Using *forks* for parallel processing in R is not always safe. > > [...] > > Comments? > > Using fork() is never safe. The reference provided by Kevin [1] is > pretty compelling (I kindly encourage anyone who ever forked a process > to read it). Therefore, I'd go beyond Henrik's suggestion, and I'd > advocate for deprecating fork clusters and eventually removing them > from parallel. > > [1] > https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf > > -- > Iñaki Úcar > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
