core.cache is a new Clojure contrib library providing the following features:

• An underlying CacheProtocol used as the base abstraction for implementing new synchronous caches

• A defcache macro for hooking your CacheProtocol implementations into the Clojure associative data capabilities.

• Immutable implementations of some basic caching strategies

  • First-in-first-out (FIFOCache)
  • Least-recently-used (LRUCache)
  • Least-used (LUCache)
  • Time-to-live (TTLCache)
  • Naive cache (BasicCache)

• Implementation of an efficient buffer replacement policy based on the low inter-reference recency set algorithm (LIRSCache) described in the LIRS paper

• Factory functions for each existing cache type

core.cache is based on a library named Clache, found at http://github.com/fogus/clache that is planned for deprecation.

Absorb

You can use core.cache in your Leiningen and Cake projects with the following :dependencies directive in your project.clj file:

[org.clojure/core.cache "0.5.0"]

For Maven-driven projects, use the following slice of XML in your pom.xml’s <dependencies> section:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.clojure</groupId>
  <artifactId>core.cache</artifactId>
  <version>0.5.0</version>
</dependency>

Enjoy!

Places

• Source code
• Ticket system
• Announcement
• Examples and documentation – in progress

Whither Clache

The v0.5.0 version of core.cache is based almost wholly on the final version of Clache, with the following changes:

• An addition of an evict function on the CacheProtocol used to explicitly remove a value from a cache based on a key. All of the existing cache types implement this function except for LIRSCache.

• The addition of cache factory functions for all of the existing cache types

• The associative structure behaviors are defined solely in terms of the underlying CacheProtocol

• The SoftCache implementation was buggy and removed for now

Plans

The following capabilities are under design, development, or consideration for future versions of core.cache:

• Asynchronous caching protocol
• LIRSCache evict
• Removal of the seed function from the CacheProtocol
• Reimplementation of a cache based on soft references
• test.generative usage
• Deprecation of Clache
• Documentation and examples

More planning is needed around capabilities not listed nor thought of.

:F