On cooking shows, recipes requiring lengthy baking or stewing are prepared beforehand.
The bake
and stew
functions perform analogously, performing an R computation and storing the result in a named file.
If the function is called again and the file is present, the computation is not executed; rather, the results are loaded from the file in which they were previously stored.
Moreover, via their optional seed
and kind
arguments, bake
and stew
can control the pseudorandom-number generator (RNG) for greater reproducibility.
After the computation is finished, these functions restore the pre-existing RNG state to avoid side effects.
The freeze
function doesn’t save results, but does set the RNG state to the specified value and restore it after the computation is complete.