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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

Version (development version)

Significant changes

  • All future.apply functions will now attempt to interrupt any remaining non-resolved futures if a user interrupt (Ctrl-C) is signalled or one of the futures produces an error. For backends that support interruption of futures, this results in the functions return sooner and compute resources are freed up sooner.

New Features

  • Now future.apply lets future take care of the generation of parallel RNG seed. Consolidating random number generation to the core package will allow us to add central support for custom parallel RNG methods beyond the built-in L’Ecuyer-CMRG method.

Deprecated and Defunct

  • Specifying the function FUN for future_by() as a character string is defunct. It should be specified as a function, e.g. FUN = sqrt and FUN = `[[`, which is what base::by() requires. Use of a string has been deprecated since future.apply 1.10.0 (2022-11-04).

  • Use of ... as global variables is now considered a mistake. For example, instead of f <- function(X, ...) future_lapply(X, function(x) sum(x, ...)), use f <- function(X, ...) future_lapply(X, function(x, ...) sum(x, ...), ...) such that ... is passed as arguments.

Version 1.11.3

CRAN release: 2024-10-27

Bug Fixes

  • Use of future.seed = TRUE could result in an error !any(seed_next != seed) is not TRUE in rare cases.

Version 1.11.2

CRAN release: 2024-03-28

Miscellaneous

  • Relaxed on unit test that triggered an error on 32-bit architectures.

Version 1.11.1

CRAN release: 2023-12-21

Bug Fixes

  • Option future.globals.maxSize was never passed down to parallel workers.

  • The assertion of argument INDEX of future_tapply() would fail with another error in R (< 3.6.0), if INDEX was incorrect in the first place.

Version 1.11.0

CRAN release: 2023-05-21

Significant Changes

  • future_tapply() now accepts data frames as input, just as tapply() does in R (>= 4.3.0).

  • In R (>= 4.3.0), future_tapply(X, INDEX, ...) now accepts INDEX being a formula when X is a data frames, just as tapply() does in R (>= 4.3.0). An error is produced if used in R (< 4.3.0).

  • In R (>= 4.3.0), future_by(X, INDICES, ...) now accepts INDICES being a formula when X is a data frames, just as by() does in R (>= 4.3.0). An error is produced if used in R (< 4.3.0).

New Features

  • Now future operators such as %globals%, %seed%, and %stdout% can be used to control the corresponding future.* arguments, e.g. y <- future_lapply(1:3, FUN = my_fun) %seed% TRUE is the same as y <- future_lapply(1:3, FUN = my_fun, future.seed = TRUE).

Bug Fixes

  • Contrary to lapply(X, ...), future_lapply(X, ...) failed to use method-specific [[ subsetting, if the class of X implemented one. future_mapply() and other functions had the same problem. The reason was that when X is partitioned into chunks, it would lose the class attribute before subsetting with [[.

Version 1.10.0

CRAN release: 2022-11-05

Bug Fixes

Deprecated and Defunct

  • Specifying the function FUN for future_by() as a character string is deprecated, because base::by() does not support it. It should be specified as a function, e.g. FUN = sqrt and FUN = `[[`.

Version 1.9.1

CRAN release: 2022-09-07

Bug Fixes

  • Some warnings and errors showed the wrong call.

Miscellaneous

  • Fix some HTML5 issues in help pages.

Version 1.9.0

CRAN release: 2022-04-25

Signficant Changes

Performance

  • Now captured standard output and conditions are deleted as soon as they have been relayed. This requires future (>= 1.25.0).

Deprecated and Defunct

  • Removed moot argument future.lazy from all functions. Regardless of setting it to TRUE or FALSE, futures would be resolved momentarily and always before the apply returned.

Version 1.8.1

CRAN release: 2021-08-10

Bug Fixes

  • citEntry() in CITATION used argument notes instead of note.

Version 1.8.0

New Features

  • Add argument future.envir to all future_nnn() functions, which is passed as argument envir to future().

  • Add option future.apply.debug for debugging features specific to this package. It defaults to option future.debug.

Performance

  • Internal getGlobalsAndPackagesXApply() now avoids calculating the object size of ... arguments if option future.globals.maxSize is +Inf.

Bug Fixes

  • f <- function(...) future_lapply(X, function(x) list(...)); f(a=1) would produce an error on ’unused argument (a = 1)” with the upcoming release of future 1.22.0.

Version 1.7.0

CRAN release: 2021-01-04

New Features

  • The automatic capturing of conditions can be disabled by specifying future.conditions = NULL.

  • Warnings and errors on using the RNG without specifying future.seed are now tailored to the future.apply package.

Version 1.6.0

CRAN release: 2020-07-01

Signficant Changes

  • future_apply() gained argument simplify, which is added to R-devel (to become R 4.1.0).

Bug Fixes

  • future_apply(X, FUN, ...) would pass all future.* arguments except future.globals, future.packages, and future.labels to the FUN function instead of processing them locally. This would often result in the FUN producing an error on “unused argument”. It also affected future.seed not being applied, which means for some FUN functions that did not produce this error, non-reproducible results could have been produced.

Version 1.5.0

CRAN release: 2020-04-17

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 1.4.0

CRAN release: 2020-01-07

New Features

  • Now all future_nnn() functions set a label on each future that reflects the name of the future_nnn() function and the index of the chunk, e.g. "future_lapply-3". The format can be controlled by argument future.label.

Performance

  • The assertion of the maximum size of globals per chunk is now significantly faster for future_apply().

Bug Fixes

  • future_lapply(X) and future_mapply(FUN, X) would drop names argument of the returned empty list when length(X) == 0.

  • Package could set .Random.seed to NULL, instead of removing it, which in turn would produce a warning on “‘.Random.seed’ is not an integer vector but of type ‘NULL’, so ignored” when the next random number generated.

Version 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2019-06-18

New Features

  • Now future.conditions defaults to the same as argument conditions of future::future(). If the latter changes, this package will follow.

  • Debug messages are now prepended with a timestamp.

Bug Fixes

  • The error “sprintf(…) : ‘fmt’ length exceeds maximal format length 8192” could be produced when debugging tried to report on too many globals.

Version 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2019-03-07

New Features

Bug Fixes

  • Attributes add and ignore of argument future.globals were ignored although support for them was added in future (>= 1.10.0).

  • Validation of L’Ecuyer-CMRG RNG seeds failed in recent R devel.

Version 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2019-01-17

Signficant Changes

  • Added argument future.stdout and future.conditions for controlling whether standard output and conditions (e.g. messages and warnings) produced during the evaluation of futures should be captured and relayed or not. Standard output is guaranteed to be relayed in the same order as it would when using sequential processing. Analogously for conditions. However, standard output is always relayed before conditions. Errors are always relayed. Relaying of non-error conditions requires future (>= 1.11.0).

New Features

  • Elements can be processed in random order by setting attribute ordering to "random" of argument future.chunk.size or future.scheduling, e.g. future.chunk.size = structure(TRUE, ordering = "random"). This can help improve load balancing in cases where there is a correlation between processing time and ordering of the elements. Note that the order of the returned values is not affected when randomizing the processing order.

  • Swapped order of arguments future.lazy and future.seed to be consistent with ditto arguments of future::future().

Version 1.0.1

CRAN release: 2018-08-26

Documentation / Licence

  • The license is GPL (>= 2). Previously it was documented as GPL (>= 2.1) but that is a non-existing GPL version.

Bug Fixes

  • For list objects X where X != as.list(X), future_lapply(X) did not give the same result as lapply(X). Analogously for future_vapply(X).

  • future_mapply() could drop class attribute on elements iterated over, because .subset() was used internally instead of `[`(). For instance, iteration over Date objects were affected.

Version 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2018-06-20

Signficant Changes

  • License changed from LGPL (>= 2.1) to GPL (>= 2) to make sure it is compatible with the source code adopted from R base’s apply(), Map(), replicate(), sapply(), and tapply(), which are all GPL (>= 2).

New Features

  • Added future_apply(), future_mapply(), and future_Map().

  • Added argument future.chunk.size as an alternative to argument future.scheduling for controlling the average number of elements processed per future (“chunk”). In R 3.5.0, the parallel package introduced argument chunk.size.

  • The maximum total size of globals allowed (option future.globals.maxSize) per future (“chunk”) is now scaled up by the number of elements processed by the future (“chunk”) making the protection approximately invariant to the amount of chunking (arguments future.scheduling and future.chunk.size).

Bug Fixes

  • future_lapply(X, ...) did not search for globals in X.

  • future_vapply() did not return the same dimension names as vapply() when FUN.VALUE had no names but FUN(X[[1]]) had.

Software Quality

  • Test code coverage is 100%.

Version 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2018-05-01

New Features

Version 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2018-01-15

  • Package submitted to CRAN.

Version 0.0.3

Documentation

  • Vignette now covers the basics of the package and describes its role in the R package ecosystem together with a road map going forward.

Software Quality

  • Added more package tests. Code coverage is currently at 100%.

Version 0.0.2

Performance

  • future_lapply(x, ...) is now much faster and more memory efficient for large x vectors because it uses internal fold() function that is more efficient (memory and speed) version of base::Reduce(f, x), especially when length(x) is large.

Version 0.0.0-9000

New Features