The 'future' hexlogo balloon wall
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