Garbage collection and threads
To help avoid unnecessary copies, BPCells in some circumstances keeps direct references to R objects. The major use-cases when that happens are:
- Loading data from an R object (e.g. dgCMatrix)
- Using pre-loaded R vectors holding row/col names (or cell/chr names) to avoid repeatedly reading from disk.
Unfortunately, we need to be extremely careful that these R objects are only created/destroyed on the R main thread. As stated in the R extensions documentation:
Calling any of the R API from threaded code is ‘for experts only’ and strongly discouraged. Many functions in the R API modify internal R data structures and might corrupt these data structures if called simultaneously from multiple threads. Most R API functions can signal errors, which must only happen on the R main thread. Also, external libraries (e.g. LAPACK) may not be thread-safe.
Within Rcpp, R objects will default to being protected from garbage collection (code link). This means, however, that the Rcpp object constructors and destructors must only execute on the main thread as they interact with the R API to manage GC protection.
From the design of BPCells C++ code, we will often have code that is
running not on the main thread, e.g. the C++ function
run_with_R_interrupt_check runs the main work in a
background thread to simplify interrupt checking. And obviously explicit
parallelization will result in code running off the main thread.
For safety, we must assume that MatrixLoader and
FragmentLoader objects may contain references to R objects.
Therefore their constructors and destructors can only be called from the
main thread.
Ensuring constructors are only called from the main thread is fairly simple – just put all constructors in the top level when directly requested from R.
To ensure destructors are only called on the main thread, we must
never give ownership of a MatrixLoader or
FragmentLoader object to a worker thread. Passing
references or raw pointers is fine. Giving ownership via unique_ptr,
move semantics, or pass-by-value must all be avoided when handing a
MatrixLoader or FragmentLoader to a worker
thread.
