Description
A Future API for R is provided. In programming, a future is an
abstraction for a value that may be available at some point in the future.
The state of a future can either be unresolved or resolved. As soon as it is
resolved, the value is available. Futures are useful constructs in for instance
concurrent evaluation, e.g. multicore parallel processing and distributed
processing on compute clusters. The purpose of this package is to provide a
lightweight interface for using futures in R. Functions 'future()' and 'value()'
exist for creating futures and requesting their values. An infix assignment
operator '%<=%' exists for creating futures whose values are accessible by the
assigned variables (as promises). This package implements the synchronous "lazy"
and "eager" futures, and the asynchronous "multicore" future (not on Windows).
Additional types of futures are provided by other packages enhancing this
package.