R - Concurrent Programming

Question

Is it possible to do concurrent programming in R

For example, running 2 functions with while(TRUE) loops concurrently.

Answer 1

The snow, Rmpi, and pvm packages have supported this for almost a decade, initially across computers and also on a multi-cpu or multi-core machine.

The multicore package added a the ability to do this on multi-core machines.

Since R 2.14.0, the parallel package has bundled parts of snow and multicore in the basic R distribution. This may be your best starting point now.

A few parts of R itself also use multi-threaded programming, but that approach is limited due to some architectural constraints that are unlikely to be lifted.

We wrote a survey paper on parallel programming with R a few years ago which is still relevant.