Lazy Enumerator in Ruby

2022-04-04•softwareruby

Enumerator::Lazy allows constructing chains of operations without evaluating them immediately, and evaluating values on an as-needed basis.

It redefines most of the Enumerable methods so that they just construct another lazy enumerator.

What is an enumerator?

Each time we use enumerable methods like map, collect, select, we create an enumerator class. The enumerable objects can be chained.

[1, 2, 3].map { ... }.select { ... }

Normal Enumerator

Let’s say, we have to fetch 10 Twitter users’ profiles, who have @anime in their profile bio. Assume, we have 1000 Twitter user IDs. Simply, we may do this to fetch 10 users:

# Array of user ids
user_ids = [...]

user_ids.map { |user_id| TwitterClient.user(user_id) }
        .select { |data| data[:description].includes?("@anime") }
        .first(10)

This code iterated 1000 users, even if the first 10 users had @anime in their descriptions.

Let’s say about another case.

Let’s try running it without lazy

range = 1..Float::INFINITY
range.collect { |x| x**2 }.first 5

This code in irb will run forever because the collect method will loop through all the members of an infinity range.

Lazy Enumerator

The Lazy Enumerator was added to ruby from version 2.0

In the first example:

# Array of user ids
user_ids = [...]

user_ids.lazy
        .map { |user_id| TwitterClient.user(user_id) }
        .select { |data| data[:description].includes?("@anime") }
        .first(10)

The iteration ends after we fetched 10 matched condition users.

In the second example:

range = 1..Float::INFINITY
range.lazy.collect { |x| x**2 }.first 5

The iteration will end after it takes the first 5 numbers.

When using lazy enumerable methods, ruby will return an instance of Enumerator::Lazy containing the previous Enumerable. Then, we call the other supported methods such as collect, take, drop. Instead of evaluating the block’s result and pass to the next block, ruby will construct and return the new Enumerator::Lazy containing the previous Enumerator::Lazy.

irb(main):003:0> range = 1..Float::INFINITY
=> 1..Infinity
irb(main):004:0> enum = range.lazy.collect{|x| x+1; p x+1}.collect{|x| x*2; p x*2}
=> #<Enumerator::Lazy: #<Enumerator::Lazy: #<Enumerator::Lazy: 1..Infinity>:collect>:collect>

You also have to make sure you are using the methods that are supported by Enumerator::Lazy.

You also want to know that Haskell uses lazy evaluation by default.

References

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