Comments on: Timed Memoization

By: sam

sam — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:08:18 +0000

great function . took it to my website

By: Kris Kowal

Kris Kowal — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:17:24 +0000

@Dean sorry for the delay. Steve just let me know I missed your message. I’m using Chiron for a variety of projects including a browser-based MUD-like game, a remote Python shell, a log aggregation service, and some other data-visualization stuff. I’ve been promoting it as much as I can (the http://modulesjs.com website, presented at Barcamp LA a couple weeks ago http://cixar.com/barcamp for slides); it’s designed to be a platform for a “batteries included” JavaScript library. If it looks awesome, it’s partially because I read your base2 code to help inform its design, although I would still like to integrate more of your code.

In recent news, I’m using memoize, and my Dict-like Cookie type in tandem to do cookie-based caching on a function.

include(‘cookie.js’);
include(‘cache.js’);
this.fib = memoize(cookie, fib);

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:42:30 +0000

Dean, you’re of course very welcome to do so.

By: Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:24:15 +0000

@Steve – Fair enough. I thought you had some clever implementation of getElementsByClassName() in mind.

It’s still a cool function though. I might steal it and include it in base2.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:38:19 +0000

Dean, I agree that it could only improve getElementsByClassName functions in limited circumstances. The case I was specifically thinking of when I wrote that was code that invokes getElementsByClassName and runs onmouseover for a DOM node, thereby potentially being triggered thousands of times over a short amount of time. Memoization (timed or otherwise) would probably never be a good idea as a general purpose alteration for such functions, but depending on the nature of one’s application they might decide the benefits outweigh the risks. That said, the real reason I used that example was that I couldn’t think of a better one. I didn’t originally write this implementation for the ability to garbage collect cached values after a while, but that seemed like a potentially interesting extension that was easy to add.