lazy

[ allennlp.common.lazy ]

---

T

T = TypeVar("T")

Lazy

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

@classmethod
def my_constructor(
    cls,
    some_object: Lazy[MyObject],
    optional_object: Lazy[MyObject] = None,
    required_object_with_default: Lazy[MyObject] = Lazy(MyObjectDefault),
) -> MyClass:
    obj1 = some_object.construct()
    obj2 = None if optional_object is None else optional_object.construct()
    obj3 = required_object_with_default.construct()

construct

class Lazy(Generic[T]):
 | ...
 | def construct(self, **kwargs) -> T