[Python-ideas] functools.lru_cache manual cache modification

[Constantin Berhard]

On 02.12.2014 13:57, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> As far as I'm aware, this is actually a deliberate design decision.
> There are so many degrees of freedom in designing a cache API that
> without constrainting the usage model it's really quite difficult to
> come up with a flexible abstraction that's easier to use than just
> building your own custom caching class.
Then couldn't we just create a functools.cache, which takes as argument
a data structure with dict-like actions. Then there is a
collections.LruCache class, which is the data structure currently used
in functools.lru_cache.

Then

@functools.lru_cache

would become

@functools.cache(collections.LruCache(maxsize=128))

Where LruCache would be quite trivially based on collections.OrderedDict

> And once you expose the underlying mapping in functools.lru_cache
> itself, it hugely constraints the internal implementation of that
> cache (since you just made a whole lot of things that are currently
> implementation details part of the public API).
With the above approach, exposing the underlying cache structure would
be on purpose, s.t. the user can freely chose the kind of cache to use.

This can then be done more explicitly by exposing the underlying cache
as decorated_function.cache or something like that.

> It's OK if folks with needs that don't quite fit the standard idiom
> write their own custom class to handle it - that makes it possible to
> keep the standard tools simple to handle the standard cases, while
> folks with different needs can just write something specifically
> tailored to their situation, rather than trying to learn and configure
> a more generic API.
In this case I need the standard tools for the standard cases to expose
more functionality, s.t. I can make my lib [1] interoperate with the
standard lib. I.e. I need to manually add entries to the cache because
there are function calls that the cache decorator can't get directly
notified of.

Best Regards,
Constantin

[1] my tail call optimization lib:
<https://titania.fs.uni-saarland.de/projects/libtco>