I'm curious if anyone knows anything about any work being done on async versions of packages like {readr} and {httr2}. In particular with {readr} making use of libuv's existing async architecture and performing the IO on background threads (via the underlying libuv C/C++ calls).
Yes, I'm aware that {future} can be used as a mechanism to handle parallelism , but in some cases this should be achievable without forking (or any equivalent use of an additional R process) ... {httpuv} wraps existing async C/C++ libuv calls and avoids {future}, for example. For file IO and some libcurl calls, this should be achievable with {later} (to handle R callbacks when C/C++ operations complete) and then ideally abstracted to use {promises} for programmatic ease.
{readr} and {httr}/{httr2} seem like the lowest-hanging fruit in the tidyverse for this, and was simply wondering if there's active work being done there. And if not, if there's an appetite for it, or if {future} works well-enough for most people.