lazily 0.12.0

A library for lazy evaluation with context caching

lazily

Lazy reactive primitives for Python — Slots, Cells, and Signals 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 provides a small reactive family for context-aware computation:

• Slot — a lazily-computed cached value that automatically tracks its dependencies (slot / slot_def).
• Cell — a mutable value that invalidates dependent Slots when it changes (cell / cell_def, Cell, CellSlot).
• Signal — an eager derived value that recomputes the instant a dependency invalidates, with no intermediate unset value (signal / signal_def).

Values are 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 — reach for Signal, which layers a puller over a memoized Slot. The Slot → Cell → Signal progression lets you choose lazy or eager per derived value within one graph. An equal recompute is suppressed by a PartialEq/memo guard, so unchanged values never cascade downstream work.

There is no dedicated Context class — a plain dict is the context. Slots use themselves as dictionary keys to cache values, so any dict works as the reactive "world."

Installation

pip install lazily

Example usage

from lazily import CellSlot, cell, slot

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


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


# A CellSlot can also have a default value.
@cell
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.

Type	Purpose
BaseSlot[C_in, C_ctx, T]	Base slot without subscriber support
Slot[C_in, C_ctx, T]	Slot with dependency tracking and invalidation
slot	Decorator: Slot with an identity context resolver
slot_def(resolve_ctx)	Decorator factory for a custom context resolver

Cell

A Cell holds a mutable value. Reading cell.value inside a Slot auto-subscribes that Slot; assigning cell.value = x (or cell.set(x)) compares old and new via != and, only if changed, cascades invalidation to dependents.

Type	Purpose
Cell[T]	Mutable value with subscription support
CellSlot[C_in, C_ctx, T]	Slot that returns a Cell
cell	Decorator: CellSlot with an identity resolver
cell_def(resolve_ctx)	Decorator factory for a custom context resolver

Signal

A Signal is the eager counterpart to a lazy Slot — one step further along the Slot → Cell → Signal progression. Where a Slot marks itself dirty on invalidation and recomputes on the next read, a Signal 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 CellSlot, signal

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


@signal
def doubled(ctx: dict) -> int:
    return n(ctx).value * 2


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

s = doubled(ctx)   # eager: materialized now
print(s.value)     # 2

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

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

Type	Purpose
Signal[T]	Eager derived value bound to a single context
signal	Decorator: context-cached eager-Signal factory (one Signal per context)
signal_def(resolve_ctx)	Decorator factory with a custom context resolver

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.

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 7 DeltaOp variants (CellSet, SlotValue, Invalidate, NodeAdd, NodeRemove, EdgeAdd, EdgeRemove) 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()

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.

The lazily family

lazily-py is one binding in a cross-language reactive family that shares the lazily-spec wire protocol:

Binding	Language	Package
lazily-rs	Rust	lazily (crates.io)
lazily-py	Python	lazily (PyPI)
lazily-zig	Zig	GitHub
@lazily/signaling	TypeScript / Cloudflare Worker	npm
lazily-spec	—	wire protocol + conformance fixtures
lazily-formal	—	Lean 4 formal model (FSM kernel + Harel state chart)

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.

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.