lazy

[ allennlp.common.lazy ]

---

T

T = TypeVar("T")

Lazy Objects

class Lazy(Generic[T]):
 | def __init__(self, constructor: Callable[..., T])

This class is for use when constructing objects using FromParams, when an argument to a constructor has a sequential dependency with another argument to the same constructor. For example, in a Trainer class you might want to take a Model and an Optimizer as arguments, but the Optimizer needs to be constructed using the parameters from the Model. You can give the type annotation Lazy[Optimizer] to the optimizer argument, then inside the constructor call optimizer.construct(parameters=model.parameters).

This is only recommended for use when you have registered a @classmethod as the constructor for your class, instead of using __init__. Having a Lazy[] type annotation on an argument to an __init__ method makes your class completely dependent on being constructed using the FromParams pipeline, which is not a good idea.

The actual implementation here is incredibly simple; the logic that handles the lazy construction is actually found in FromParams, where we have a special case for a Lazy type annotation.

Warning

The way this class is used in from_params means that optional constructor arguments CANNOT be compared to None before it is constructed. See the example below for correct usage.

@classmethod
def my_constructor(cls, some_object: Lazy[MyObject] = None) -> MyClass:
    ...
    # WRONG! some_object will never be None at this point, it will be
    # a Lazy[] that returns None
    obj = some_object or MyObjectDefault()
    # CORRECT:
    obj = some_object.construct(kwarg=kwarg) or MyObjectDefault()
    ...

construct

 | def construct(self, **kwargs) -> Optional[T]