memoize with lifetime?

[hmeyer]

Hey Lewin! When writing a dynamic programming solution for Advent of Code I was really happy to find memoize! But sadly it does not (yet) support the use case. One reason is, that due to the current implementation references are not supported.

I don't have a good solution yet, but I wonder: What would it take to change memoize from global cache to a cache with a non-'static lifetime?

Cheers, Henning

[dermesser]

Hi Henning! Similarly to #18 or #19 this appears to be a question of whether memoize should be a silver bullet solution to all caching.

At the moment the goal is: "Decorate a function with this one directive, and it will just work*", where *) if your function has a simple signature and returns somewhat plain objects so that we don't have to care about lifetimes, references, etc.

Of course this is not enough for a generalized caching framework. That in turn would (I argue) torpedo the small and straight-forward feature set currently realized here. Given that using hashmaps is not very complex, in such a situation it seems easier for a developer to implement a small cache themselves.

With respect to non-static cache for memoize, one problem is that - at the moment - the memoize macro is used at the top level around function definitions. It is therefore not really possible (for all I know) to not use a 'static and global cache. If what you need is a non-static, non-global cache, we come back to what I said above, and the simplest solution would be something along the lines of:

struct ComplexType(int32, String);
struct MySimpleCache<'a>(HashMap<&'a ComplexType, String>);

impl<'a> MySimpleCache<'a> {
  fn business_logic(&mut self, arg: &'a ComplexType) -> &str {
    // look up in own cache and/or recalculate.
  }
}

which gives you ultimate control and is not that complex either.

I hope I grasped your issue correctly, and please let me know if you have specific ideas that I don't see yet! :-)

All the best, Lewin.

[hmeyer]

I have a vague idea, at least for the use case for dynamic programming problems. Oftentimes those problems come in recursive form like so:

fn recursive_fn(args...) -> Foo {
  ...
  ...
  let partial_foo = recursive_fn(derived_args...);
  ...
  return result;
}

I wonder if one could write a function attribute which transforms this into:

fn recursive_fn(args...) -> Foo {
  return memoized_recursive_fn(&mut Hashmap::new(), args...);
}

fn memoized_recursive_fn(cache: &mut Hashmap<Args, Foo>, args...) -> Foo {
  if let Some(result) = cache.get(&args) {
    return result;
  }
  ...
  ...
  let partial_foo = memoized_recursive_fn(derived_args...);
  ...
  cache.insert(args, result);
  return result;
}