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The future package turns ten on CRAN today – June 19, 2025.
(Image credits: Dan LaBar for the future logo; Hadley Wickham
and Greg Swinehart for the ggplot2 logo and balloon wall; The future
balloon wall was inspired by ggplot2’s recent real-world version and
generated with ChatGPT.)
The future package turns ten years old today. I released version
0.6.0 to CRAN on June 19, 2015, just days before I presented the
package and sharing my visions at useR! 2016. I had no idea adoption
would snowball the way it has. It’s been an exciting, fun journey, and
the best part has been you – the users and developers who shaped the
futureverse through questions, discussions, bug reports, and feature
requests. Thank you!
To celebrate, I’m kicking off a series of posts over the next few
weeks covering the latest improvements that make it easier than ever
to scale existing code up or out on a parallel or distributed backend
of your choice – and eventually in ways that are neater than what our
trusty workhorses future.apply and furrr offer.
These gains come from a slow, steady, multi-year process of
remodelling: internal redesigns, working with package maintainers to
retire use of deprecated functions, releasing, fixing regressions, and
repeating – all while end-users and most developers not noticing,
except for a few. The first CRAN release where this work could be
noticed was future 1.40.0 (April 10), followed by regression fixes
and additional features in 1.49.0 (May 9), and lately 1.57.0 (June 5,
2025). More polishing and features are coming before we hit future
2.0.0 – in the near future (pun firmly intended). Thanks for helping
make future a cornerstone of scalable R programming.
Stay tuned and may the future be with you!
Henrik
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