Skip to contents

Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

Version (development version)

New Features

  • Now ‘callr’ futures can be interrupted using interrupt(). An interrupted future can be reset() and relaunched.

  • A future that failed due to the ‘callr’ worker process was terminated is now considerred interrupted, which for instance means that it can be reset().

  • Now ‘callr’ futures relay immediateCondition:s in near real-time, e.g. progression contdions signals by the progressr package.

Version 0.8.2

CRAN release: 2023-08-09

Bug Fixes

  • If a ‘callr’ future failed, because the parallel process crashed, the corresponding parallel-worker slot was never released.

Version 0.8.1

CRAN release: 2022-12-14

Bug Fixes

  • run() for CallrFuture would update the RNG state, because callr::r_bg(), used to launch the future, does so. This would compromise numeric reproducibility, where the callr future backend would not give the same random numbers as other future backends. Now run() launches the future in stealth RNG mode, i.e. gives r_bg() a semi-random initial seed to work with (by removing .Random.seed) and then undo the RNG state at the very end.

Version 0.8.0

CRAN release: 2022-04-01

New Features

  • Now resolved() supports early signaling.

  • Now result() and value() gives a slightly more informative error message in case the callr process failed with a non-zero exit code.

Version 0.7.0

CRAN release: 2021-11-21

New Features

  • Add option to configure callr futures to be “supervised” by the callr package when setting up the plan, i.e. plan(callr, supervise = TRUE).

  • Now callr-specific orchestration errors are of class CallrFutureError, which provides information also on the future that failed.

Version 0.6.1

CRAN release: 2021-05-04

Bug Fixes

  • A callr future that produces a large amount of standard error (stderr) could stall forever when collecting its results. The exact reason is unknown but the symptom is currently that the underlying processx process never terminates, resulting in a never-ending wait for the results. Since futures don’t capture stderr in other backends, the workaround for now is to discard all stderr output. Note that messages, warnings, etc. are still captured and relayed.

Version 0.6.0

CRAN release: 2021-01-04

Significant Changes

  • Removed S3 generic function await(), which was used for internal purposes.

New Features

Deprecated and Defunct

  • Removed S3 generic function await(), which was used for internal purposes.

Version 0.5.0

CRAN release: 2019-09-28

Significant Changes

  • resolved() for CallrFuture will launch lazy futures [future (>= 1.15.0)].

New Features

  • Debug messages are now prepended with a timestamp.

Version 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2019-01-07

New Features

  • Now the future label is exposed in the process information (e.g. top) via a dummy --future-label="<label>" argument in the callr system call.

Bug Fixes

  • plan(callr, workers) where workers being a function would result in an error when a future was created.

Version 0.3.1

CRAN release: 2018-07-18

New Features

  • The ‘callr’ backend supports the handling of the standard output as implemented in future (>= 1.9.0).

Bug Fixes

  • Callr futures did not protect against recursive parallelism, e.g. with plan(list(callr, callr)) the second layer of futures would use the same number of workers as the first layer.

Version 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2018-05-03

New Features

  • Argument workers of future strategies may now also be a function, which is called without argument when the future strategy is set up and used as is. For instance, plan(callr, workers = halfCores) where halfCores <- function() { max(1, round(availableCores() / 2)) } will use half of the number of available cores. This is useful when using nested future strategies with remote machines.

  • Gathering of results from background processes is made a little bit more robust against slow file systems by retrying a few times before accepting an error as an error.

Code Refactoring

  • Prepared code to gather a richer set of results from futures.

Bug Fixes

  • Callr futures did not acknowledge timeout option future.wait.timeout.

Version 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2018-02-13

New Features

  • Producing errors of class FutureError where applicable.

Documentation

  • Minor updates to the vignette related to the callr package.

Version 0.1.1

Bug Fixes

  • Number of workers in plan(callr, workers = n) was not respected.

Version 0.1.0

New Features

  • Added ‘callr’ futures. Use plan(callr) or plan(callr, workers = 4L).