We at Appsilon are excited about RStudio introducing promises in R quite soon. This will be a huge step forward in programming in R. We have already used futures and similar libraries to run code asynchronously, but this is going to be a standard and it looks like it’s going to be very easy to use. They support chaining which is a great way of building clean code by piping computations that take a long time.
We’ve used futures/promises/tasks in programming languages like C#, Scala, Javascript and promises have always had a big impact on the way code is structured and on the overall execution speed.
We recently spoke with Joe Cheng, and he mentioned promises at the EARL conference. Here are some links if you’re interested in reading more about promises on GitHub and Medium.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.