The async package: Generators, async/await, and asynchronous streams for R

This is an R package implementing generators, async blocks, and streams (collectively known as “coroutines.”)

New features in version 0.3

• Coroutines now support single step debugging. Use debugAsync(obj, TRUE) to pause before each call at R level. You can also use debugAsync(obj, internal=TRUE) to step through at the coroutine implementation level.
• Coroutines are printed with a label indicating where in their code they are paused.
• switch supports goto() to transfer to a different branch.
• Coroutines now support on.exit().
• There is now syntax for generator functions: gen(function(x, y) ...) returns a function that constructs generators.
• run(...) will execute a generator expression immediately and collect the results in a list.
• There is now an experimental stream() coroutine backed by a channel class (asynchronous iterator).
• The underlying implementation now includes the back half of a compiler. As evidence of this, you can draw a graph of a coroutine’s control structures by calling graphAsync(gen) (this requires you have Graphviz dot command installed on your system.)

For more details see NEWS.md.

Generators

g <- gen({...}) is like a function that knows how to “pause.” The code in a generator runs until it hits a yield() call, then returns that value. The next time you call the generator it picks up where it left off and runs until the next yield.

From the outside a generator implements the iteror interface. You extract each yielded value with nextOr(g, or), and you can use generators anywhere you can use an iteror. The iteror class is cross compatible with the iterators package.

Example: Collatz sequence

Consider a sequence of numbers x[i], starting with an arbitrary x[1], where each subsequent element is produced by applying the rule:

• If x[i] is even, then the next value will be x[i+1] = x[i]/2.
• if x[i] is odd, the next value will be x[i+1] = 3*x[i]+1.

An infinite sequence of numbers will continue form each staring point x[1], but it is conjectured that all sequences will eventually reach the loop 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, …. The following generator produces the Collatz sequence, starting from x, and terminating when (or if?) the sequence reaches 1.

library(async)
collatz <- gen(function(x) {
  yield(x)
  while (x > 1) {
    if (x %% 2 == 0)
      yield(x <- x / 2L)
    else yield(x <- 3L * x + 1)
  }
})

The call to gen produces a generator. You can get values one at a time with nextOr().

ctz <- collatz(12)
nextOr(ctz, NA)

## [1] 12

nextOr(ctz, NA)

## [1] 6

nextOr(ctz, NA)

## [1] 3

nextOr(ctz, NA)

## [1] 10

nextOr(ctz, NA)

## [1] 5

You can also use any other method that applies to an iterator, like as.list.

collatz(27L) |> as.list() |> as.numeric()

##   [1]   27   82   41  124   62   31   94   47  142   71  214  107  322  161  484
##  [16]  242  121  364  182   91  274  137  412  206  103  310  155  466  233  700
##  [31]  350  175  526  263  790  395 1186  593 1780  890  445 1336  668  334  167
##  [46]  502  251  754  377 1132  566  283  850  425 1276  638  319  958  479 1438
##  [61]  719 2158 1079 3238 1619 4858 2429 7288 3644 1822  911 2734 1367 4102 2051
##  [76] 6154 3077 9232 4616 2308 1154  577 1732  866  433 1300  650  325  976  488
##  [91]  244  122   61  184   92   46   23   70   35  106   53  160   80   40   20
## [106]   10    5   16    8    4    2    1

#Try collatz(63728127L) |> as.list() |> as.numeric()...

For more examples, see the “Clapping Music” vignette.

Async/await

Like gen, async({...}) takes a block of sequential code, which runs until it reaches a call to await(p). The argument p should be a promise, (as defined by the promises package, which represents an unfinished external computation.) In turn, async() constructs and returns a promise.

An async block runs until it reaches a call to await(p) and pauses. When the promise p resolves, the async block continues. If p rejects, that is evaluated like an error; you can use await(p) into a tryCatch to handle rejections. When the async block finishes, or throws an error, its promise resolves or rejects.

Examples:

async doesn’t handle running concurrent tasks by itself; it builds on existing packages like future and later. The later package lets you assign tasks to be done in the event loop, when R is idle.

Ring a bell 5 times at 10 second intervals (subject to R being idle):

async({
  for (i in 1:5) {
    await(delay(10))     #delay() uses later::later()
    cat("Beep", i, "\n")
    beepr::beep(2)
  }
})

Shiny apps

async() can be used in Shiny apps! For an example, here is a version of the “Cranwhales” demo app using async/await..

Web scraping

async() allows you to naturally keep track of more than one concurrent process. The web spider vignette shows how this can improve the speed of web scraping using concurrent connections.

Background processing

async can also work with future objects to run computations in parallel. Download, parse, and summarize a dataset in background processes like this:

library(future)
library(dplyr)
plan(multiprocess(workers=2))

url <- "http://analytics.globalsuperhypermegamart.com/2020/March.csv.gz"
dest <- "March.csv.gz"

dataset <- async({
  if(!file.exists(dest)) {
    await(future({
      cat("Downloading\n")
      download.file(url, dest)
    }))
  }
  data <- await(future({
    cat("Parsing\n")
    read.csv(dest) |>
    mutate(time = hms::trunc_hms(time, 60*60)) |>
    group_by(time) |>
    summarize(sales=sum(amount))
  }))
})

# When the data is ready, plot it (in the main process:)
async({
  await(dataset) |>
  ggplot(aes(time, n)) +
    xlab("Time") +
    ylab("Sales")
})

Streams

New in version 0.3 are asynchronous streams and channels. A channel is an interface for asynchronous iteration; stream() lets you do things with channels by writing code with await and yield. Here is an example of channels being used to “walk and chew gum concurrently:”

walk <- stream({
  for (i in 1:10)
    for (step in c("left", "right")) {
      yield(step)
      await(delay(0.5))
    }
})

chewGum <- stream(for (i in 1:12) {
  yield("chew")
  await(delay(0.8))
})

printEach <- async(function(st) {
  for (each in st) {cat(each, ", ", sep="")}
  cat("\n")
})

all <- combine(walk, chewGum) |> printEach()

## left, chew, right, chew, left, right, chew, left, chew, right, left, chew, right, chew, left, right, chew, left, right, chew, left, chew, right, left, chew, right, chew, left, right, chew, left, right,

How does this work anyway?

A longer article will be forthcoming, but the basic gist is the async package transforms your given program into a state machine.

A coroutine expression is first scanned for uses of await, yield, for, break and other control flow calls. Those calls are swapped out for implementations local to the async package. Other R calls are wrapped in functions; all these functions are linked together in so that each function calls the next in sequence. The result is a graph of functions calling each other, each call corresponding to a step in the program.

As of async version 0.3 you can extract and visualize this graph with graphAsync(g). (You will need Graphviz dot installed to render these graphs.

ctz <- collatz(23)
graphAsync(ctz, type="svg") #creates a file "ctz.svg"

Since each step in the program’s execution corresponds to a function call, when execution reaches a yield, the program’s state is just the “next function” that would have been called (that is, a continuation.) To pause and resume execution, a generator saves that “next function” until the next time nextOr() is called.

You can also enable single-stepping at the graph level by calling:

debugAsync(ctz, internal=TRUE)