# Base.retry: what is it for?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/base-retry-what-is-it-for/137815>\
**Category:** Performance\
**Created:** [June 26, 2026, 8:02am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/base-retry-what-is-it-for/137815 "2026-06-26T08:02:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mzaffalon](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mzaffalon/32/214168_2.png) [@mzaffalon](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mzaffalon)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2026, 8:02am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/base-retry-what-is-it-for/137815/1 "2026-06-26T08:02:19Z")

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I understand the documentation for [Base.retry](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/base/#Base.retry). It seems useful but it does not seem to be used in Julia Base and in the standard library.

Is there a specific reason?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![GunnarFarneback](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/gunnarfarneback/32/1827_2.png) [@GunnarFarneback](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/GunnarFarneback)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2026, 9:17am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/base-retry-what-is-it-for/137815/2 "2026-06-26T09:17:55Z")

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It’s intended as tool when you do operations that may temporarily fail, e.g. because some event hasn’t happened yet or a shared resource is busy.

Possible reasons why it’s not used within Base:

- Most of Base shouldn’t be doing things that might fail in the first place.
- Some parts of Base were written before `retry` was introduced in Julia 0.5.
- Some functionality provided by external libraries may use retry support built into the library.