R Observatory: Metrics for future version 1.80.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

future

1.80.0Package record

Unified Parallel and Distributed Processing in R for Everyone

320packages dependsuggested by 246

4.5Mdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Henrik BengtssonCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

The purpose of this package is to provide a lightweight and unified Future API for sequential and parallel processing of R expression via futures. The simplest way to evaluate an expression in parallel is to use `x %<-% { expression }` with `plan(multisession)`. This package implements sequential, multicore, multisession, and cluster futures. With these, R expressions can be evaluated on the local machine, in parallel a set of local machines, or distributed on a mix of local and remote machines. Extensions to this package implement additional backends for processing futures via compute cluster schedulers, etc. Because of its unified API, there is no need to modify any code in order switch from sequential on the local machine to, say, distributed processing on a remote compute cluster. Another strength of this package is that global variables and functions are automatically identified and exported as needed, making it straightforward to tweak existing code to make use of futures.

Changes in 1.80.0

Significant Changes

Memory use on parallel workers has gone down significantly in some cases. A side effect is also significantly faster processing in those cases. This improvement has an immediate effect on several **future.apply** functions: future_lapply(), future_sapply(), future_apply(), future_tapply(), future_by(), future_Filter(), future_eapply(), future_mapply(), and future_Map().

Bug Fixes

cluster and multisession futures could leave a stray, unclosed worker connection behind if a worker was relaunched. This would eventually result in warnings on "closing unused connection" when the garbage collector ran.

Show all changes in 1.80.0Hide the rest of the changes in 1.80.0

Explicitly specifying globals as a character vector via attributes add or ignore would be ignored silently, e.g. globals = structure(c("a", "b"), add = "c").
A future that uses a global ... together with a global ...future.FUN() function, which is what **future.apply** uses, could fail with "cycles in parent chains are not allowed". In R (< 4.5.0), it ended up in an infinite loop. This bug was introduced in **future** 1.40.0 (2025-04-10).
A sequential future that uses a global ... together with a global ...future.FUN() function, which is what **future.apply** uses, could permanently change the parent of the function's environment, if that environment inherits from the global environment. This bug was introduced in **future** 1.40.0 (2025-04-10).
makeClusterFuture(globals = ...) would result in an future evaluation error.
Futures failed on R (< 4.0.0). This bug was introduced in **future** 1.68.0 (2025-11-17).
Globals identified automatically (the default) could carry extra, unneeded load that was exported to the parallel workers. This could result in significant overhead in both total memory use and total processing time.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("future", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("futureverse/future")

Development version from futureverse/future. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-future

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-future

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-future

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 11.2 min · r-release-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-05-08
WARNING12 OK, 1 WARNING2026-05-07
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.80.0

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettesYes · 10 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.80.0Citation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Cites an R Journal article

Help pages: 44 (26 internal)
Examples that run: 88%15 run in a plain check (2 of them under a condition) · 2 only when donttest examples are enabled (R CMD check --as-cran)
Exported functions with examples: 48%
Documented parameters: 90%
Return-value docs: 94%
Help pages citing references: 2%

Also includes 2 demo scripts (run with demo())

How these are measured

Downloads

4.5M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #162 · ~12.5K/day · ~379.1K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

358K30 days

1.1M90 days

4.5M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on110.8K r2u236 autocran483.5K conda_forge81.7K bioconda18.3K c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

futureverse/future ↗Organization: futureverse

1,015Stars

94Forks

78Open issues

3Open PRs

0Releases

4,807Commits

18Commit identities

rcranparallel-processingparallel-computingdistributed-computinghpc-clustershpcpromises

License file reads as Apache-2.0 · 4,807 commits · Last activity 2026-10-18 · 0% stars, 30d · Discussions: 155 posts

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 63%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 82
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 1

Stars over time

2025-10-11 · 9912026-10-06 · 1,015

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

12 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 8 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/futureverse/future on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (3)

Code of conduct (inherited from futureverse)Contributing guide (inherited from futureverse)Issue templates

Docs source (2)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-10-11

pkgdown site last built 2026-10-11, before release 1.80.0 (2026-10-16)

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting

Show all practicesHide 4 practices

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

Makefile

CRAN release process (1)

revdep/

Research and citation (1)

CITATION.cff

Automation and maintenance (1)

pre-commit

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen on or before 2026-09-03
Commits: at least 1 crediting it in the message

Models named in its commits

Claude Opus 51 commit · Sep 2026

Counts are commits, not lines of code. Commits by a tool's accounts count once across all of its accounts. Commits crediting it are the largest count among its credit lines, a minimum.How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

7 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing future adds 4 packages (2 with compiled code, 690 KB of source tarballs). Heaviest: parallelly 343 KB, digest 231 KB, globals 61 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.2.0

Imports (7)

digest globals listenvparallelparallellytoolsutils

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (4)

methodsRhpcBLASctl R.rsp markdown

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

320direct

983indirect

Depends 14 · Imports 306

Suggested by 246

Show the 48 most downloaded dependentsHide the 48 most downloaded dependents

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

and 272 more dependents and 246 packages that suggest it on CRAN ↗

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Henrik Bengtsson

Releases (66)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

1.80.0Latest
record
2026-09-24 · current release · diff ↗
1.76.0
record
2026-09-24 · diff ↗
1.75.0
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2026-07-20 · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.70.0
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2026-03-14 · diff ↗
1.69.0
record
2026-01-16 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
as.cluster
1.68.0
record
2025-11-17 · diff ↗
1.67.0
record
2025-07-29 · diff ↗
1.58.0
record
2025-06-05 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
DefaultDeviceMisuseFutureCondition, DefaultDeviceMisuseFutureError, DefaultDeviceMisuseFutureWarning
1.49.0
record
2025-05-09 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
interrupt

added 3 exports
FutureCanceledError, FutureLaunchError, cancel
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
1.40.0
record
2025-04-10 · diff ↗ ·
removed 11 exports
ClusterFuture, ConstantFuture, GlobalEnvFutureCondition, GlobalEnvFutureError, GlobalEnvFutureWarning, MulticoreFuture, MultisessionFuture, SequentialFuture, autoStopCluster, makeClusterMPI, makeNodePSOCK

added 25 exports
ClusterFutureBackend, ConnectionMisuseFutureCondition, ConnectionMisuseFutureError, ConnectionMisuseFutureWarning, DeviceMisuseFutureCondition, DeviceMisuseFutureError, DeviceMisuseFutureWarning, FutureBackend, FutureDroppedError, FutureInterruptError, GlobalEnvMisuseFutureCondition, GlobalEnvMisuseFutureError, GlobalEnvMisuseFutureWarning, MulticoreFutureBackend, MultiprocessFutureBackend, MultisessionFutureBackend, SequentialFutureBackend, interrupt, interruptFuture, launchFuture, listFutures, minifuture, reset, stopWorkers, validateFutureGlobals
1.34.0
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2024-07-29 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.33.2
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2024-03-26 · diff ↗
1.33.1
record
2023-12-22 · diff ↗

Show 62 earlier eventsHide 62 earlier events

1.33.0
record
2023-07-01 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
multiprocess
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
1.32.0
record
2023-03-07 · diff ↗ ·
added 4 exports
FutureJournalCondition, GlobalEnvFutureCondition, GlobalEnvFutureError, GlobalEnvFutureWarning
1.31.0
record
2023-02-01 · diff ↗ ·
removed 3 exports
TransparentFuture, remote, transparent
1.30.0
record
2022-12-16 · diff ↗
1.29.0
record
2022-11-06 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
values
1.28.0
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2022-09-02 · diff ↗
1.27.0
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2022-07-22 · diff ↗
1.26.1
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2022-05-27 · diff ↗
1.25.0
record
2022-04-24 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
1.24.0
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2022-02-19 · diff ↗
1.23.0
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2021-10-31 · diff ↗
1.22.1
record
2021-08-25 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
TransparentFuture, futureSessionInfo
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.21.0
record
2020-12-10 · diff ↗ ·
added 4 exports
RngFutureCondition, RngFutureError, RngFutureWarning, nbrOfFreeWorkers
1.20.1
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2020-11-03 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
find_rshcmd
1.19.1
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2020-09-22 · diff ↗
1.18.0
record
2020-07-09 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
1.17.0
record
2020-04-18 · diff ↗
1.16.0
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2020-01-16 · diff ↗
1.15.1
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2019-11-25 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
resetWorkers
1.15.0
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2019-11-08 · diff ↗
1.14.0
record
2019-07-02 · diff ↗
1.13.0
record
2019-05-09 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
1.12.0
record
2019-03-08 · diff ↗
1.11.1.1
record
2019-01-27 · diff ↗
1.11.0
record
2019-01-22 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
future_lapply

added 2 exports
%conditions%, find_rshcmd
1.10.0
record
2018-10-17 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
autoStopCluster, makeClusterMPI
1.9.0
record
2018-07-23 · diff ↗ ·
removed 5 exports
FutureEvaluationCondition, FutureEvaluationError, FutureEvaluationMessage, FutureEvaluationWarning, getOutput

added 1 export
%stdout%
1.8.1
record
2018-05-03 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
UnexpectedFutureResultError
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
1.8.0
record
2018-04-08 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
FutureResult, result
1.7.0
record
2018-02-11 · diff ↗ ·
removed 4 exports
EagerFuture, LazyFuture, eager, lazy

added 8 exports
%packages%, FutureCondition, FutureEvaluationCondition, FutureEvaluationError, FutureEvaluationMessage, FutureEvaluationWarning, FutureMessage, FutureWarning
1.6.2
record
2017-10-17 · diff ↗
1.6.1
record
2017-09-09 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
getGlobalsAndPackages
1.6.0
record
2017-08-13 · diff ↗ ·
removed 2 exports
%<=%, %=>%
1.5.0
record
2017-05-26 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
mandelbrotTiles

added 1 export
mandelbrot_tiles
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
1.4.0
record
2017-03-13 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
FutureGlobals, as.FutureGlobals
1.3.0
record
2017-02-19 · diff ↗ ·
added 6 exports
%lazy%, %seed%, SequentialFuture, availableWorkers, future_lapply, sequential
1.2.0
record
2016-11-12 · diff ↗ ·
added 4 exports
as.cluster, makeClusterPSOCK, makeNodePSOCK, sessionDetails
1.1.1
record
2016-10-11 · diff ↗
1.1.0
record
2016-10-10 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
%globals%, %label%, run
1.0.1
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2016-07-04 · diff ↗
1.0.0
record
2016-06-24 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
mandelbrot, mandelbrotTiles
0.15.0
record
2016-06-14 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
remote
0.14.0
record
2016-05-17 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
FutureError, getOutput, nbrOfWorkers
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.13.0
record
2016-04-14 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
injectNextStrategy

added 8 exports
%->%, %<-%, %tweak%, ConstantFuture, backtrace, getExpression, transparent, tweak
0.12.0
record
2016-02-24 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
MultiprocessFuture, UniprocessFuture, multiprocess
0.11.0
record
2016-01-20 · diff ↗ ·
added 6 exports
ClusterFuture, MultisessionFuture, cluster, futureCall, injectNextStrategy, multisession
0.10.0
record
2015-12-31 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
futures, resolve, values
0.9.0
record
2015-12-12 · diff ↗
0.8.2
record
2015-10-14 · diff ↗
0.8.1
record
2015-10-05 · diff ↗
0.8.0
record
2015-09-07 · diff ↗
0.7.0
record
2015-07-14 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
availableCores
0.6.0
record
2015-06-19
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2015-06-19
Total releases: 66 / 11 yrs
License: Apache License (>= 2) · relicensed from LGPL (>= 2.1) in 1.75.0
Minimum R: ≥ 3.2.0
Download size: 477 KB

Appears in task views

High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' entry:

citation("future")

The package provides a citation file, so citation() returns the authors' own entry.

It points to 10.32614/rj-2021-048.

The repository also keeps a CITATION.cff.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for future version 1.80.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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