Why can't ray.remote be used to decorate partial functions?

Ray Core
1

I noticed that it doesn’t seem to be possible to decorate partial functions with ray.remote (at least in ray 1.6.0):

import functools
import ray
ray.init()
def foo(x, y):
    return x+y
foo2 = ray.remote(foo)                                         # this works
result = ray.get([foo2.remote(x, y) for x, y in zip(range(5), range(5))])
foo3 = ray.remote(functools.partial(foo, y=1)) # this raises a TypeError

Is there some design reason as to why this is the case?

2

Hi @lebedov,

Welcome!

Try:

ray.get([functools.partial(ray.remote(foo).remote, y=1)(x=x) for x in range(5)])
3

Thanks, @mannyv - that works! Still curious why partial functions are disallowed - looking through the code in worker.py and actor.py, it seems to be due to more than just simple type checking to exclude arguments that are not functions or classes…

4

Thanks for this. Solves my same minded question