lazily

Lazy reactive primitives for Python — the Cell kernel (Source / Computed cells, plus Effect) with automatic dependency tracking and cache invalidation, plus the language-agnostic lazily-spec wire protocol for mirroring graph state across processes and languages.

Overview

lazily is the Python port of the Cell kernel (#lzcellkernel): two value kinds — Source and Computed — plus the value-less Effect sink. Cell is the value-node concept; Source is its native writable handle.

• Source — a value written from outside (set / merge); the writable kind. Construct with source / cell (native class Source, slot SourceSlot; Cell / CellSlot remain identity-preserving migration aliases). A MergeCell is a Source whose write folds under a non-KeepLatest policy (Cell ≡ Source(KeepLatest)).
• Computed — a value computed from upstream, via a compute function. Construct with computed(ctx, f). Guarded by default and lazy by default.
• Effect — a value-less sink outside the hierarchy; nothing can depend on it.

A Computed is lazy by default: dependents are marked dirty on invalidation but only recompute when accessed. When you need eager push-style semantics — recompute immediately, observe v1 → v2 with no unset window — make it eager: computed(ctx, f).eager(). Going eager attaches a scheduled puller Effect over the backing memo (eagerness is graph state — an _eager bit plus a side table — not a distinct type), so N writes inside one batch re-materialize the computed once, at the flush. Every cell is guarded — an equal recompute is suppressed by the PartialEq guard (matching TC39 Signal.Computed), so unchanged values never cascade downstream work. There is no unguarded derived mode: computed is the guarded derived constructor, and the former separate memo construction is retired.

Migration note (v2 Cell kernel, #lzcellkernel). The v1 value vocabulary is removed: Signal / signal / signal_def, formula / formula_def / FormulaCell, SourceCell / SourceCellSlot, and the .drive() / .undrive() / is_driven / is_active methods are gone. Use the v2 spelling instead — an eager Computed is computed(ctx, f).eager(); the lifecycle is .eager() / .lazy() / .is_eager(). The construction sugar cell / cell_def is deprecated in favour of source / source_def, and the derived-value slot decorator is deprecated in favour of the guarded computed (slot_def remains as the storage-sense factory). Python has no compile-time read/write split (see the design's §4): the split is a convention — a Source has set / merge, a Computed does not — not a runtime gate.

There is no dedicated Context class — a plain dict is the context, so the Rust reference's ctx.computed(f) is spelled computed(ctx, f) here. Slot is retained as the storage position that holds a node: a Slot uses itself as the dictionary key that caches its value, so any dict works as the reactive "world" (lazily-spec §5.0 "Slot-as-storage"). It is the Python analog of lazily-rs's surviving storage-sense Slot; construct it directly with Slot(callable=…) when a raw storage node is genuinely needed.

Feature coverage

Coverage by feature family across every binding, generated from coverage.json in lazily-spec. Legend: ✅ shipped · ~ partial · — absent · ⊘ not applicable. The canonical matrix with per-cell notes and platform carve-outs lives in lazily-spec § Cross-Language Coverage.

Summary — family × language

Roll-up rule: a family cell is ✅ only when every required row in that family is ✅; ~ when the family is mixed (some shipped or partial); — when no required row is shipped or partial; ⊘ only when every required row in the family is not applicable. Rows the spec marks MAY (optional) are excluded from the roll-up — declining an optional feature is not a gap.

A family cell summarises 83 feature rows. For row-level marks, per-cell notes, and platform carve-outs see the canonical coverage matrix in lazily-spec.

Core conformance evidence

scripts/core-conformance.json declares the shell-free Core report command. The command replays the canonical Core fixture closure against the single-threaded, thread-safe, and async contexts, then writes fresh mutation-kill evidence below LAZILY_CORE_REPORTS_ROOT/python and the observed report to LAZILY_CORE_REPORT_PATH.

The report is intentionally partial today: the async context has no signal surface for the three signal fixtures, and every context lacks the bounded feedback-drain diagnostic required by feedback_drain_bound_reports_exhaustion.json. The Python package also does not claim the native C-ABI consumer proof: its ctypes wire helpers are not a shipped native artifact boundary.

Installation

pip install lazily

The library itself has no third-party runtime dependencies. The optional extras only pull in the struct libraries the struct bridge can adapt — the stdlib backends (dataclasses, NamedTuple) need no extra at all:

pip install "lazily[msgspec]"      # or [pydantic], [attrs], [structs] for all three
pip install "lazily[prometheus]"  # the prometheus_client egress adapter

Example usage

from lazily import SourceSlot, source, slot

# Sources hold a value that can be updated.
name = SourceSlot[dict, dict, str]()


# Slots are functions that depend on sources and other slots.
@slot
def greeting(ctx: dict) -> str:
    print("Calculating greeting...")
    return f"Hello, {name(ctx).value}!"


# A SourceSlot can also have a default value.
@source
def response(ctx: dict) -> str:
    return "How are you?"


@slot
def greeting_and_response(ctx: dict) -> str:
    print("Calculating greeting_and_response...")
    return f"{greeting(ctx)} {response(ctx).value}"


ctx = {}

name(ctx).value = "World"

# First access: runs the function
print(greeting(ctx))
# Calculating greeting...
# 'Hello, World!'

# Second access: uses cache (no print)
print(greeting(ctx))
# 'Hello, World!'

# Dependencies also access cached values
print(greeting_and_response(ctx))
# Calculating greeting_and_response...
# 'Hello, World! How are you?'

# Dependencies also cached
print(greeting_and_response(ctx))
# 'Hello, World! How are you?'

# Update cell: invalidates cache
name(ctx).value = "Lazily"

# Access again: re-runs the function
print(greeting_and_response(ctx))
# Calculating greeting_and_response...
# Calculating greeting...
# 'Hello, Lazily! How are you?'

# Another access: uses cache
print(greeting_and_response(ctx))
# 'Hello, Lazily! How are you?'

Core Concepts

Context

A plain dict is the context. It owns all cached Slot values; Slots store their cache under themselves as keys. The current implementation is single-threaded — create one dict per reactive graph.

Slot

A Slot wraps a compute function (ctx) -> T; the result is cached after first access. Dependencies are discovered automatically via a global slot_stack — any Slot or Cell read during computation becomes a dependency and re-subscribes on every recompute, so conditional branches update the dependency graph with no manual cleanup. When a dependency invalidates, the Slot only marks its cache dirty; it does not recompute until called again.

Source cell

A Source cell holds a mutable value. Reading cell.value inside a Computed or Effect auto-subscribes that reader; assigning cell.value = x (or cell.set(x)) compares old and new via != and, only if changed, cascades invalidation to dependents. Construct with source (the v1 cell name is deprecated).

Eager Computed

An eager Computed — computed(ctx, f).eager() — is the counterpart to a lazy Computed. Where a lazy cell marks itself dirty on invalidation and recomputes on the next read, an eager one recomputes the instant a dependency is invalidated, before the mutating call returns. The value is always materialized, so observers never see an intermediate unset value.

from lazily import SourceSlot, computed

n = SourceSlot[dict, dict, int]()

ctx: dict = {}
n(ctx).value = 1

doubled = computed(ctx, lambda c: n(c).value * 2).eager()  # eager: materialized now
print(doubled.value)   # 2

n(ctx).value = 5       # doubled recomputes immediately
print(doubled.value)   # 10 — already current, no lazy read needed

An eager Computed is composed from existing primitives, not a parallel engine: a memoized backing Slot supplies glitch-free, guarded recomputation, and a small puller Effect re-materializes it after every invalidation to supply the eagerness. It inherits the guard (an equal recompute suppresses the downstream cascade). .lazy() (or .dispose()) removes the eager puller — the value stays readable but reverts to lazy (recompute-on-read) behavior.

StateMachine

StateMachine[S, E] is a finite state machine backed by a reactive Cell, so its state participates in dependency tracking like any other reactive value. Construct it with StateMachine(ctx, initial, transition) where transition is a pure (state, event) -> next_state | None (returning None rejects the event). send(event) returns whether the transition was accepted; a self-transition to an equal state is accepted but suppressed by the Cell's PartialEq guard.

Reactive collections, async, and thread-safe contexts

lazily-py also implements the lazily-spec compute-layer MUSTs, each ported from its Lean formal model in lazily-formal:

• ReactiveMap / SourceMap / ComputedMap / SourceTree — keyed reactive collections (#reactivemap) with independent value/membership/order signals and atomic move. One generic ReactiveMap over a handle kind; SourceMap (input cells, adds set + eager entry) and ComputedMap (derived slots, lazy get_or_insert_with + eager materialize_all) are its specializations.
• QueueCell — a reactive FIFO queue (SPSC primitive with an MPSC-via-batch usage rule) with a pluggable QueueStorage backend. Reader-kind invalidation (head/len/is_empty/is_full/closed), bounded reactive backpressure via is_full, and the closure lifecycle (drain / Closed-distinct-from-Empty / idempotent).
• LatestDurableProjectionCore / LatestDurableProjection — keyed durable egress that converges each sink key to its latest desired epoch, permits one in-flight attempt per key, and generation-fences stale acknowledgements.
• reconcile_ops — move-minimized keyed reconciliation (LIS kernel).
• AsyncSlot / AsyncEffect — the async slot lifecycle with stale-completion discard, and cleanup-before-body effect scheduling.
• ThreadSafeContext — a lock-serialized batch boundary that coalesces writes into one invalidation pass.
• lazily.ffi — the C-ABI FFI boundary (LazilyFfiStatus, LazilyFfiMessageKind incl. CrdtSync = 3, LazilyFfiBytes).

The test suite gates on lazily-formal's lake build (every theorem checks) and mirrors the named Lean theorems as property tests. See SPEC.md for the full compliance surface.

Struct bridge — struct_source

struct_source explodes one struct instance into per-field Source cells plus a single guarded Computed that re-materializes the struct. A reader that depends on one field is invalidated only when that field changes; a reader of the whole struct keeps depending on all of them and pays one construction per settled wave. It is the swap-in path for code that already holds a *State struct and hands out a fresh copy from a status() method.

from dataclasses import dataclass

from lazily import computed, struct_source


@dataclass
class Status:
    queue_depth: int
    last_error: str | None = None


ctx: dict = {}
status = struct_source(ctx, Status(queue_depth=0))

# Depends on ONE field.
depth_view = computed(ctx, lambda c: c.read(status["queue_depth"]) * 2).eager()
# Depends on the whole struct.
whole = computed(ctx, lambda c: c.read(status.struct)).eager()

status.update(last_error="boom")   # depth_view is NOT invalidated
status.update(queue_depth=3)       # both recompute
status.update(queue_depth=3)       # guarded: equal write, nothing recomputes

# Ingress for code that already produces a fresh instance: only the fields that
# actually moved invalidate, and the whole write is one batch.
status.apply(Status(queue_depth=4, last_error="boom"))

status.value        # Status(queue_depth=4, last_error='boom')

The bridge is library-agnostic. Built-in backends, in resolution order: msgspec Struct, pydantic v2 BaseModel, attrs, stdlib dataclasses, stdlib NamedTuple. None of them is imported at module scope, and none is imported to decide whether a type belongs to it — the probes are structural (an MRO entry from that module, or the marker attribute the library stamps on the class), so an application that never imports msgspec never loads it because of lazily. Register another library with register_struct_backend(backend); it takes precedence over the built-ins, and re-registering a built-in's name replaces it rather than shadowing it.

Non-init fields are not bridged: they are recomputed by the constructor, so they are not independent state. pydantic re-materializes through model_construct (values are already validated, and re-validating per wave is the cost the bridge exists to remove); pass PydanticBackend(validate=True) to struct_source(..., backend=...) to validate on every re-materialization instead.

Durable execution — lazily.workflow

lazily.temporal is not temporal.io. It is lazily's time-operator family (TimerCell, IntervalCell, CronCell, DeadlineCell) — "temporal" in the tense / logical-clock sense, and older than the engine of the same name. The temporal.io integration is lazily.workflow. The name is kept because lazily.temporal is public API in nine bindings and renaming it across all of them would be a breaking change bought only for this note.

A durable engine replays workflow code from its event log and expects the same decisions in the same order. A reactive graph fits that well — it is already a pure function of its sources — until something in it reads the wall clock, a random number, or a UUID. Then replay diverges silently and surfaces much later as a workflow that will not complete.

lazily.workflow is the boundary that makes that loud. It does not depend on temporalio: the engine is injected as a clock accessor plus a two-method scheduler, so the same code runs against temporal.io, a test double, or any other durable engine.

from lazily import TimerCore, deterministic_scope, workflow_context

# inside a temporalio workflow
wf = workflow_context(ctx, workflow.now, scheduler=TemporalScheduler())
timer = wf.register(TimerCore(fire_at=wf.clock.tick() + 5_000))

with deterministic_scope():
    while not timer.fired():
        await wf.schedule_next()   # a durable engine timer, not a sleep
        wf.advance()               # one clock reading drives every source

• One reading per advance. advance() reads the engine clock once and ticks every registered source, so two sources can never disagree about what time it is — the shape that makes a replay diverge from the original run.
• The clock refuses to go backwards. ManualClock clamps a backwards move, which is right for a game loop and wrong here: a replayed clock cannot regress, so a backwards reading means something is feeding it wall time. It raises.
• activity() is the only sanctioned side effect. A reactive effect inside a workflow must not perform I/O itself — the effect reruns on replay and the I/O would rerun with it.
• deterministic_scope() rebinds time.time / monotonic / perf_counter (and the _ns forms), the module-level random functions, os.urandom, and uuid.uuid1 / uuid4 to raise NonDeterminismError, restoring all of them on exit including on an exception. It is a guard, not a sandbox: it cannot intercept datetime.datetime.now() (a C-type method), a name bound before the scope opened, or anything a C extension does internally. Module re-import isolation is the layer for those, which is what temporal.io's own workflow sandbox does.

Replay-equivalence proof — lazily.replay

lazily.workflow makes the reachable non-determinism raise. This is the other half of the same gate: it makes replay equivalence provable. Nobody should put a reactive graph inside a workflow without that proof, and this is the proof.

The discipline is borrowed from tsift, whose cached excerpts are trustworthy because every one records a body hash and revalidates it against the source bytes before the excerpt is returned — a stale body deterministically suppresses the cached answer rather than returning a plausible-looking one. Here the event log is the source bytes.

from lazily import LatestDurableProjectionCore, ReplayHarness, ReplayLog


class Projection:
    def __init__(self) -> None:
        self.core = LatestDurableProjectionCore(generation=1)

    def apply(self, event) -> None:              # exactly one event
        getattr(self.core, event.name)(*event.payload)

    def observe(self) -> dict[str, object]:      # the cells under proof
        return {"snapshot": self.core.snapshot()}


log = ReplayLog.from_records([
    ("upsert_desired", ("a", 1, 10)),
    ("claim", ("a", 1)),
    ("ack_applied", ("a", 1, 1)),
])
harness = ReplayHarness(Projection, deterministic=True)

fingerprint = harness.record(log)     # pin it, or commit `fingerprint.to_wire()`
harness.verify(log, fingerprint)      # raises unless the replay is identical
harness.prove(log)                    # record + re-replay, no fingerprint needed

• The fingerprint is bound to the log that produced it. verify checks log_digest before comparing any value. A fingerprint recorded against a different log raises ReplayLogMismatchError and is never compared — so it can neither pass by coincidence (two logs, same final state) nor be misreported as a graph defect. check(), which is non-raising for value divergence, still raises here: a stale fingerprint is an unanswerable question, not a report.
• Divergence is located, not just detected. Every event is a checkpoint (stride=N to sample sparsely), so the error names the first event where the values parted and the exact cell label. A fingerprint covering only the final state tells you the graph is wrong but not where.
• prove(log) needs no recorded fingerprint. It records, replays again, and compares: a graph that is not a pure function of its log already disagrees with itself. build is called once per replay, so a harness cannot accidentally prove a graph against its own leftover state.
• The encoding is canonical or it raises. canonical_bytes is type-tagged and length-framed: dict insertion order and set iteration order are not part of a value, but 1, "1", 1.0 and True are all distinct, and so are ["a", "bc"] and ["ab", "c"]. A value with no defined encoding raises ReplayEncodingError rather than degrading to repr, which embeds object addresses and would report a false divergence on every run.
• deterministic=True wraps each replay in deterministic_scope(), so a wall-clock read raises at the line that reached it instead of appearing as a divergence one checkpoint later.
• The machinery was already there. reliable_sync's DurableOutbox.replay_from() is a replay source; replay_log_from_outbox(outbox, cursor=0) makes it a fingerprinted one, using outbox epochs as event seqs so an ack-truncated prefix shows up in the log digest instead of silently shifting every event. latest_durable_projection is a deterministic state machine over such a log. What was missing was the stated contract: given the same ReplayLog, a rebuilt graph observes the same values at every checkpoint — any deviation is a defect, not a tolerance.

Hashing is BLAKE2b-256 from hashlib, not BLAKE3: lazily-py has no runtime dependencies. Digests are not wire-compatible with tsift's and are not meant to be.

Projected state chart — lazily.projected_chart

lazily.statechart owns its transitions: you send it an event and it decides where to go. That is the wrong shape when the state lives somewhere else. A workflow run's status column is owned by Postgres and advanced by Temporal — the database is the authority and the graph is strictly downstream of it. Sending such a chart an event would fork the model from the row.

So this chart never decides anything. You feed it observed states and it answers the two questions the authority cannot.

from lazily import ProjectedChart, ProjectedChartDef

defn = ProjectedChartDef.of(
    initial="queued",
    transitions={
        "queued": ["started", "failed"],
        "started": ["completed", "failed"],
        "completed": [],
        "failed": ["started"],            # a retry is legal
    },
    deadlines={"queued": 30_000, "started": 300_000},
    terminal=["completed"],
)
chart = ProjectedChart(ctx, defn)

chart.observe("started", at=row.updated_at_ms)   # adopt what the DB says
chart.tick(now_ms)                               # elapse the deadline

if chart.wedged():                               # a derived cell
    alert(chart.state(), chart.overdue_by())

• Was that transition legal? The authority still wins — an observation is always adopted — but a step the declared lifecycle does not allow is recorded as an IllegalTransition and counted on a reactive cell. Refusing the row would make this side silently disagree with the database, which is worse than not modelling it at all; adopting it quietly would tell you nothing. It adopts and says so. An undeclared state is the same story, and cannot wedge — no deadline is knowable for a state the chart has never heard of, so the violation is the signal rather than a fabricated deadline.
• Is it wedged? In a state past that state's deadline with no advance. wedged is a derived cell, so an effect, alarm, or health cell reading it is invalidated exactly on the edge — the declarative form of the hand-written "is it still started, and has it been too long" branch that otherwise accretes in a service. Terminal states and states with no deadline never wedge: a finished run is not late.
• A repeated observation does not reset the deadline. Re-observing the state the chart is already in advances the authority timestamp but not entered_at. A poller that keeps reading the same started row is evidence the run is wedged, not evidence it just advanced — resetting there would make the wedge unreachable, which is the bug this module exists to express.
• Two clocks, one time base. at is the authority's timestamp for the row and staleness is last-writer-wins on it, so an out-of-order delivery cannot walk the state backwards. tick(now) is the observer's clock and is what makes a deadline elapse; it is strictly monotone and raises on a backwards reading, because a deadline computed from a regressing clock is not a deadline. Both must be the same time base (epoch milliseconds).
• It is a TimelineSource. tick / next_fire match the protocol, so the wedge composes with the rest of the time-operator family: register it with a WorkflowContext and the wedge check becomes a durable engine timer instead of a polling loop.
• It is replayable. Both clock inputs are arguments, so ProjectedChartCore is a pure function of its observation log — the suite proves one under ReplayHarness (see lazily.replay), wedge and violations included.

ProjectedChartCore is the graph-agnostic projection (no cells, no clock of its own); ProjectedChart is the reactive shell. Sync-only — unlike the spec families there are no thread-safe or async flavours, because the subject here is one external row per chart.

Named keyed fold — lazily.keyed_fold

N independent writers, one key each. A writer sets, folds and clears only its own key; the summary is a guarded Computed over the live set. This is the general shape service.HealthCell implements for booleans and merge.MergeCell has the algebra for but no keyed surface.

The bug it exists to prevent is the last-writer-wins one: several components sharing a single cell for "the current errors", where whoever writes last erases everyone else's entry and whoever clears erases entries that were never theirs.

from lazily import KeyedFold

ctx: dict = {}
errors = KeyedFold[str, str, dict[str, str]](ctx)

intake = errors.claim("intake")          # exclusive: a second claim raises
dispatcher = errors.claim("dispatcher")

intake.set("connection refused")
dispatcher.set("timeout")
intake.clear()                           # dispatcher's entry survives

errors.value                             # {'dispatcher': 'timeout'}

A reader of one key is never invalidated by a sibling's write, and a reader of the summary is invalidated only when the summary actually changes — so a summarize that counts entries is untouched when a value moves:

fold = KeyedFold[str, int, int](ctx, lambda entries: len(entries))

policy= selects the merge algebra writer.merge(op) folds under (default KeepLatest, i.e. replace); a first write seeds the entry with the operand, since a policy is an associative merge and has no identity to start from. writer.set bypasses the policy. eager=False defers the fold to the first read, at the cost of the summary guard.

Metrics — lazily.metrics and lazily.prometheus_egress

A metric here is a reactive node, not a mirror of one. A family's child is either writable (CounterCell / GaugeCell over a Source) or derived — bound with derive, its value read straight off the graph. A derived child is the point: the scrape reads the graph, so there is no push step, no hand-maintained mirror, and no window in which the exported number disagrees with the state it describes.

from lazily import MetricsRegistry, source

ctx: dict = {}
metrics = MetricsRegistry(ctx)
connected = source(lambda c: False)

up = metrics.gauge("service_up", "1 when the component is connected.", ("component",))
up.derive(("intake",), lambda c: 1.0 if connected(c).value else 0.0)

accepted = metrics.counter("accepted_total", "Accepted messages.", ("source",))
accepted.labels("http").inc(3)

connected(ctx).value = True
# No mirror step ran. The gauge IS the graph read.
print(metrics.render_text())
# HELP service_up 1 when the component is connected.
# TYPE service_up gauge
# service_up{component="intake"} 1.0
# ...

render_text() emits the Prometheus text exposition format with no third-party dependency. For a real exporter, lazily.prometheus_egress registers the whole registry as a prometheus_client custom collector — a pull, for the same reason:

from prometheus_client import CollectorRegistry, generate_latest

from lazily import register_metrics, unregister_metrics

prom = CollectorRegistry()
collector = register_metrics(metrics, prom)
generate_latest(prom)        # resolves the graph on this scrape
unregister_metrics(collector, prom)

prometheus_client is optional (pip install "lazily[prometheus]") and imported lazily inside the calls that need it, so import lazily still loads no third-party package.

A counter is monotonic in both directions of use: inc rejects a negative delta and set refuses to move backwards, so mirroring an externally-owned absolute total can never publish a decrease a scraper would read as a counter reset. derive is lazy by default — the expression runs on collection, not on every upstream change — which is the right default for a scrape; pass eager=True when a reactive consumer of observe() should be shielded by the Computed guard from upstream changes that do not move the number.

Latest-durable projection — lazily.latest_durable_projection

Use LatestDurableProjection when the durable side effect is a projection of current state (for example, saving the latest document image), rather than a command log where every intermediate value must execute. upsert_desired keeps only the newest pending epoch per key; claim allows at most one sink attempt per key; ack_applied and fail_retryable must match that attempt's generation and epoch. reconnect advances the sink generation and safely requeues claimed work, so a stale actor can never clear newer intent.

from lazily import LatestDurableProjection

projection = LatestDurableProjection[str, str]({}, generation=1)
projection.upsert_desired("document", epoch=41, value="latest text")
attempt = projection.claim("document", generation=1).envelope
assert attempt is not None

# Await the external write in the caller's driver, then acknowledge its exact
# token. A concurrent epoch 42 remains pending even when epoch 41 succeeds.
projection.ack_applied(attempt.key, attempt.generation, attempt.epoch)

The graph-agnostic LatestDurableProjectionCore and the reactive LatestDurableProjection, ThreadSafeLatestDurableProjection, and AsyncLatestDurableProjection shells implement the same contract. The async shell's transitions are intentionally synchronous; only the external sink driver awaits I/O. All three shells replay conformance/egress/latest_durable_projection.json from lazily-spec v0.38.0 and correspond to the corrected lazily-formal v0.38.1 model.

Reactive queue — lazily.queue

QueueCell is a FIFO collection composed of reactive cells — not a new cell kind — that adds queue semantics (push to tail, pop from head) to the reactive graph. ThreadSafeQueueCell and AsyncQueueCell carry the same Core surface; the topic and work-queue families likewise ship ThreadSafe* and Async* shells. Nothing in the async family is async-coloured: storage reads, cursor advances, and lease decisions return plain values.

The reactive shell wraps a pluggable QueueStorage backend (default VecDequeStorage) and owns demand-driven reader-kind handles. It invalidates exactly the handles whose values changed — a push to a non-empty queue does NOT invalidate the head reader, while a pop does. Thread-safe shells serialize their whole public operation through a ThreadSafeContext; the same canonical fixture corpus and invalidation matrices replay against all three flavors.

from lazily import QueueCell, QueuePopError, batch

ctx = {}
q: QueueCell[str] = QueueCell(ctx)

q.try_push("a")
q.try_push("b")
assert q.head() == "a"
assert q.len() == 2
assert q.try_pop() == "a"

# Bounded queue → reactive backpressure via is_full.
bq = QueueCell[int].with_capacity(ctx, 2)
bq.try_push(1)
bq.try_push(2)
assert bq.is_full()
assert bq.try_push(3).label == "Full"   # reject at capacity
assert bq.try_pop() == 1
assert not bq.is_full()                  # pop freed a slot → is_full reader invalidated

# MPSC: multiple producers push inside one batch → one invalidation pass.
batch(lambda: (q.try_push("p1"), q.try_push("p2")))

# Closure: pop on closed+empty returns Closed (distinct from Empty).
q.close()
assert q.is_closed()
assert q.try_push("x").label == "Closed"

Competing-consumer work queue

WorkQueueCell provides exclusive FIFO claims with visibility deadlines, worker-scoped acknowledgements, tail retries, and bounded dead-letter handling. Item ids survive retries while each claim gets a fresh delivery id.

from lazily import WorkQueueCell

work = WorkQueueCell[str](ctx, visibility_timeout=10, max_deliveries=3)
work.push("job")
delivery = work.claim("worker-a", 100)
assert delivery is not None
assert work.ack("worker-a", delivery.delivery_id)

The reader-kind independence law is explicit: every successful operation derives its changed-reader set from the before/after state and resets those memoized handles in one batch. Unchanged reader kinds remain warm.

Transport-agnostic reactive ingress — lazily.ingress

A client consuming a remote stream usually grows four accidental mechanisms: a refresh() loop that re-reads whether the connection is healthy, a hand-rolled "is this message still relevant?" check, a reconnect path that forgets what was already applied, and transport-shaped consumer code that disagrees with itself per transport. Every one of those is a derive being simulated with a call. IngressCell makes them derives, and makes the transport a value the primitive never touches.

An envelope carries its own provenance (generation / sequence / stamped_at), so a WebSocket frame, an RPC response, and a polled page are the same input once decoded. Admission applies a normative order — lifecycle → generation fence → freshness → generation handoff → dedupe → ordering → backpressure → merge — and each keyed scope exposes four independent reader kinds plus three receipt channels.

from lazily import IngressCell, IngressEnvelope, IngressPolicy, Sum

ctx: dict = {}
ingress = IngressCell[str, int](ctx, IngressPolicy(reorder_window=4), Sum)

ingress.admit(IngressEnvelope("alpha", 1, 0, 0, 5))
assert ingress.value("alpha") == 5
assert ingress.readiness("alpha") == "ready"     # a derive, not a poll

# Out of order: buffered, so nothing a reader can observe moved.
ingress.admit(IngressEnvelope("alpha", 1, 2, 0, 4))
assert ingress.value_is_valid("alpha")            # the value reader stays warm

# The delivery that closes the gap flushes the run as ONE coalesced window.
ingress.admit(IngressEnvelope("alpha", 1, 1, 0, 2))
assert ingress.value("alpha") == 11
assert ingress.drain("alpha") == 11               # an egress, never an ack
assert ingress.suspend("alpha").from_sequence == 3

ThreadSafeIngressCell and AsyncIngressCell are the other two flavors of the same contract; all three replay the canonical lazily-spec/conformance/ingress/*.json corpus. Nothing in the family is async-coloured — an admission decision is a function of the fence, the watermark, the reorder buffer, and the observed clock, so there is nothing to await. Awaiting belongs to the transport, and the transport is outside the primitive by construction.

IPC — the lazily-spec wire protocol

lazily.ipc implements the language-agnostic lazily-spec wire protocol, so a Python graph's state can be mirrored to remote observers across processes and languages. The JSON encoding is byte-compatible with the Rust (lazily-rs), Zig (lazily-zig), and TypeScript (@lazily/signaling) bindings, and is validated against the canonical lazily-spec/conformance fixtures (vendored under tests/conformance/).

Two message kinds flow over any transport (WebSocket text, WebRTC data, FFI buffer):

• Snapshot — the full graph state at an epoch (nodes, edges, roots).
• Delta — an ordered batch of the 10 DeltaOp variants (CellSet, SlotValue, Invalidate, NodeAdd, NodeRemove, EdgeAdd, EdgeRemove, and the QueueCell op-log QueuePush, QueuePop, QueueClose) applied with epoch sequencing and fail-closed resync.

from lazily import (
    Snapshot, NodeSnapshot, EdgeSnapshot, ShmBlobRef,
    Delta, DeltaOp, IpcMessage,
)

# Build and serialize a snapshot — encode_json() returns transport-agnostic bytes.
snap = Snapshot(
    epoch=7,
    nodes=[
        NodeSnapshot.payload(1, "i32", bytes([1, 2, 3])),
        NodeSnapshot.opaque(2, "opaque-type"),
        NodeSnapshot.shared_blob(3, "text/plain", ShmBlobRef(0, 16, 1, 7, 999)),
    ],
    edges=[EdgeSnapshot(2, 1), EdgeSnapshot(3, 1)],
    roots=[1, 2],
)
wire = IpcMessage.of_snapshot(snap).encode_json()
assert IpcMessage.decode_json(wire).snapshot == snap

# An incremental delta carrying mutations.
delta = Delta.next(40, [
    DeltaOp.cell_set(1, bytes([10])),
    DeltaOp.invalidate(3),
])
IpcMessage.of_delta(delta).encode_json()

# The same frames over `msgpack`, the cross-language binary default: an
# externally tagged envelope over MessagePack maps keyed by the *json* field
# names. Map key order is encoder-defined, so conformance is a semantic round
# trip — `decode(encode(m)) == m` — never a golden byte string.
packed = IpcMessage.of_snapshot(snap).encode_msgpack()
assert IpcMessage.decode_msgpack(packed).snapshot == snap

A PeerPermissions boundary gates what is shared: it is default-deny, so only nodes a peer is explicitly allowed to read are serialized into a snapshot or delta — non-allowlisted nodes are omitted entirely.

Shared-memory blobs — ShmBlobArena

ShmBlobArena lets a Python process host blob payloads (not just carry ShmBlobRef descriptors). It is a bytearray-backed, append-only arena with a 40-byte header (LZSH magic + FNV-1a-64 checksum) and wraparound, ported from the lazily-rs ShmBlobArena<B> and byte-compatible with the Rust and Zig arenas. The module exports ShmBlobArena, ShmBlobArenaError (with its variant subclasses), and SHM_BLOB_HEADER_LEN.

Lossless tree CRDT — lazily.lossless_tree_crdt

LosslessTreeCrdt (#lzlosstree) is a single rooted concrete-syntax tree whose leaves own every rendered byte — render(tree) == source_text for valid, invalid, and unknown source alike. Where TextCrdt is a flat lossless floor, this is the structured tree that can itself be the wire authority. Element nodes own structure only; all text lives in leaf nodes tagged Token / Trivia / Raw / Error, so unknown/invalid spans round-trip exactly as Raw/Error leaves rather than being discarded.

from lazily import LeafKind, LosslessTreeCrdt, SeedElement, SeedLeaf
from lazily.lossless_tree_crdt import ROOT

tree = LosslessTreeCrdt(peer=1)
heading = tree.create_node(ROOT, None, SeedElement("heading"))
tree.create_node(heading, None, SeedLeaf(LeafKind.TOKEN, "# "))
title = tree.create_node(heading, None, SeedLeaf(LeafKind.RAW, "Título"))
assert tree.render() == "# Título"

# Op-based delta sync: fork, diverge, converge through a dotted frontier.
other = tree.fork(peer=2)
other.edit_leaf(title, 0, 0, "X")
tree.apply_update(other.diff(tree.frontier()))
assert tree.render() == other.render()

Leaf text embeds TextCrdt wholesale; child order is a fractional index (key_between); the clock is a Lamport TreeOpId. Anti-entropy is op-based over a dotted, non-contiguous version frontier (TreeVersionFrontier) — a dot set (contiguous prefix + sparse holes), never a per-peer max, so a missing interior op stays representable and re-requestable. Leaf-local wire offsets are UTF-8 bytes (byte_to_char). The wire codec (tree_update_to_wire / tree_update_from_wire) validates against lazily-spec's lossless-tree-delta.json, and all nine conformance/lossless-tree/ fixtures replay.

Command / RPC message plane — lazily.command

command-plane-v1 is an additive sibling to Snapshot / Delta / CrdtSync: four evented frames (CommandSubmit / CommandCancel / CommandEvents / CommandProjection) that carry command traffic, not cell state. lazily owns the envelope; the namespace owns the IpcValue payload, which lazily never decodes.

The single hard rule: terminal authority is the causal receipt. A command is terminal only when a terminal CausalReceipt for its command_id folds in (applied, or rejected — including the cancelled / superseded / timed_out reasons). observed / accepted / started events are progress only; a transport ACK is never terminal.

from lazily import (
    CommandPolicy, CommandRpcClient, CommandSubmit, DedupePolicy,
    applied_receipt,
)
from lazily.ipc import IpcValue

class Transport:
    def __init__(self):
        self.sent = []

    def send(self, message):
        self.sent.append(message)

client = CommandRpcClient(Transport())
cmd_id = client.submit(CommandSubmit(
    command_id="cmd-1", causation_id="cmd-1", source="plugin",
    target="controller", namespace="agent-doc", name="editor_route",
    authority_generation=1, idempotency_key="doc:run", deadline_ms=0,
    policy=CommandPolicy(DedupePolicy.SAME_IDEMPOTENCY_KEY, False, True),
    payload_type="agent-doc.editor_route.v1", payload_hash="sha256:…",
    payload=IpcValue.of(b"{…}"),
    required_features=["command-plane-v1"],
))
# `call` resolves ONLY on a terminal receipt — never an ACK or `accepted`.
client.ingest_receipt(applied_receipt("rcpt-1", cmd_id, "controller", 1))
assert client.poll_call(cmd_id).kind.value == "resolved"

CommandProjection is the pure reducer (generation guards, idempotency, cancel-before-terminal-only, terminal-conflict-fails-closed, reconnect equivalence); CommandRpcClient is the derived RPC facade. The wire codec validates against lazily-spec's message-passing.json, and all eight conformance/message-passing/ fixtures replay.

Benchmarks

Wall-clock benchmarks live in BENCHMARKS.md, covering both the in-library micro-suite (reactive core, keyed reconciliation, SourceMap, TextCrdt, CRDT plane) and a large spreadsheet-shaped scale suite that mirrors the lazily-rs / lazily-go scale groups (N input cells + N formula slots, formula[i] = input[i] + input[i-1]). The scale suite is measured up to a full 10,000,000-cell Google Sheets workbook (N = 5,000,000); a one-cell edit plus a 1,000-cell viewport read stays in the ~75 µs range regardless of sheet size, because the lazy pull model recomputes only the ~2 formulas that read the edited input.

make bench          # micro-suite
make bench-scale    # scale suite (default N = 1,000,000)

# or directly, with a custom size:
uv run python -m lazily.benchmarks
LAZILY_SCALE_N=5000000 uv run python -m lazily.scale_bench   # 10M-cell workbook

See BENCHMARKS.md for the full results, hardware, and honest notes on CPython's per-node overhead.

The lazily family

lazily-py is one binding in a cross-language reactive family — the same cell kernel, the same keyed collections and CRDTs, and the same lazily-spec wire protocol — so peers written in different languages talk to each other without a translation layer.

See lazily-spec for the canonical Snapshot/Delta schemas, the IPC Lean proofs of the epoch/memo/batch invariants, and the conformance fixtures every IPC-capable binding validates against. The language-agnostic formal model — the flat FSM kernel and the full Harel state chart — lives in lazily-formal.

Per-binding parity, with per-cell notes and platform carve-outs, lives in lazily-spec § Cross-Language Coverage — it is generated from coverage.json, so it does not rot the way a hand-copied table would.

Development

This project uses uv. Run the local CI-equivalent suite — type-check (ty), lint (ruff), the runnable README example, and the test suite — with:

uv run poe precommit

SPEC.md is the authoritative specification for the Python primitives and the lazily-spec compliance notes.