Describe the bug
‘future.apply’ does not work with functions defined in ’box’ modules, see klmr/box#386. However, the actual issue is unrelated to ‘box’, and can be reproduced with the following minimal example code, where the function passed to future.apply::future_lapply() (or similar) is defined in a custom environment whose parent is not (transitively) the global environment.
Reproduce example
local(
future.apply::future_sapply(1 : 5, \(x) x),
envir = new.env(parent = baseenv())
)
Or, similarly:
f = \(x) x
environment(f) = new.env(parent = baseenv())
future.apply::future_sapply(1 : 5, f)
Both of the above result in the following error (on R 4.5 — on previous versions the behaviour differs, and leads to an infinite loop):
Warning: Caught simpleError. Canceling all iterations ...
Error in `parent.env<-`(`*tmp*`, value = <environment>) :
cycles in parent chains are not allowed
Expected behavior
The code should work as if being run in the global environment, i.e. it should result in 1 : 5.
Session information
Details
R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
Running under: macOS Monterey 12.7.6
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.frame
work/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;
LAPACK version 3.12.1
locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8
time zone: Europe/Zurich
tzcode source: internal
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] future_1.69.0 nvimcom_0.9.67
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.5.2 parallelly_1.46.1 parallel_4.5.2 tools_4.5.2
[5] listenv_0.10.0 future.apply_1.20.1 codetools_0.2-20 digest_0.6.39
[9] globals_0.19.0
Describe the bug
‘future.apply’ does not work with functions defined in ’box’ modules, see klmr/box#386. However, the actual issue is unrelated to ‘box’, and can be reproduced with the following minimal example code, where the function passed to
future.apply::future_lapply()(or similar) is defined in a custom environment whose parent is not (transitively) the global environment.Reproduce example
Or, similarly:
Both of the above result in the following error (on R 4.5 — on previous versions the behaviour differs, and leads to an infinite loop):
Expected behavior
The code should work as if being run in the global environment, i.e. it should result in 1 : 5.
Session information
> sessionInfo()Details