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Great article, memoization is pretty complex and full of trade-offs. We recognized a lot of these same pitfalls as we worked through making memoization a consis

Great article, memoization is pretty complex and full of trade-offs. We recognized a lot of these same pitfalls as we worked through making memoization a consistent and common pattern in our (very large, monolithic Rails) codebase via a `memoize def...` helper. The `false` and `null` pitfall is _surprisingly_ common, enough that it (and other pitfalls) warranted us writing our own memoization DSL. We took the opposite approach of most libraries though (and a reason we rolled our own instead of pulling in an existing gem) by avoiding handling the complex edge cases that hide trade-offs: 1. Class methods can't be memoized. 2. Methods with arguments can't be memoized (so no LRU caches, weak refs, tracking arguments, handling default args, hash/deep object equality, etc) The thought at the time was that those more complex scenarios deserve more thought than "prefix it with `memoize`". It's been a few years since we introduced the helper and after seeing it all throughout our codebase with no issues I'm even more confident this was the correct decision. I haven't revisited it in a while, but I'd love to add some extra niceties to it, like hooking into `ActiveRecord`s `#reload`, although I dislike memoizing in models.

kazinator 2y ago
In TXR Lisp, I implemented an original invention of mine called Paremeter List Macros (Parameter Macros for short). A parameter macro works in any lambda syntax. Methods, macros. The documentation for Parameter List Macros shows an example implementation of rudimentary memoization. https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-C9CAE162 https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-C9CAE162 You can use :memo in a method if you like, in a lambda expression, defmacro, macrolet, labels, ...: anywhere you have a lambda parameter list. There is a predefined parameter macro called :key which implements keyword parameters. (Common-Lisp-like keyword parameters are not native to the language run-time at all: you have to use this param macro if you want them.) Another predefined parameter macro called :match allows you to express a function with pattern matching. :match will take stock of your patterns and implicitly generate a parameter list which can take any of those patterns, and a function body which then further handles the cases.

kazinator 2y ago

In TXR Lisp, I implemented an original invention of mine called Paremeter List Macros (Parameter Macros for short). A parameter macro works in any lambda syntax. Methods, macros. The documentation for Parameter List Macros shows an example implementation of rudimentary memoization. https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-C9CAE162 https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-C9CAE162 You can use :memo in a method if you like, in a lambda expression, defmacro, macrolet, labels, ...: anywhere you have a lambda parameter list. There is a predefined parameter macro called :key which implements keyword parameters. (Common-Lisp-like keyword parameters are not native to the language run-time at all: you have to use this param macro if you want them.) Another predefined parameter macro called :match allows you to express a function with pattern matching. :match will take stock of your patterns and implicitly generate a parameter list which can take any of those patterns, and a function body which then further handles the cases.