Tag: memoization

Timed Memoization

Certain operations are computationally expensive, but because their results might change over time or due to outside influences, they don't lend themselves to typical memoization — take for example getElementsByClassName. Here's a JavaScript timed memoization decorator / higher-order-function I made to help with these cases, which accepts an optional expiration argument in milliseconds.

function memoize (functor, expiration) {
	var memo = {};
	return function () {
		var key = Array.prototype.join.call(arguments, "§");
		if (key in memo)
			return memo[key];
		if (expiration)
			setTimeout(function () {delete memo[key];}, expiration);
		return memo[key] = functor.apply(this, arguments);
	};
}

This approach allows you to turn any function into a memoizing function. Note that return values are memoized for each set of arguments. However, due to technical constraints it's only reliable when the arguments are arrays or scalar values, but you could easily use e.g. a toJSON method rather than join to serialize objects as part of the cache key (at some additional overhead cost).

You can use the above code like this:

// Make a function which memoizes for 1000 milliseconds at a time
var fn = memoize(function () {
	Array(500000).join("."); // slow
	return true;
}, 1000);

…Or leave out the expiration argument to permanently memoize.

Here are a couple more posts on JavaScript memoization: