RcppThread

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 associated JSS paper 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

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 occurrences 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.

References

Nagler, T. (2021). "R-Friendly Multi-Threading in C++." Journal of Statistical Software, Code Snippets, 97(1), 1-18. doi: 10.18637/jss.v097.c01