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Announcing core.cache v0.5.0

Dec 13, 2011

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

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

3 Comments, Comment or Ping

  1. Cool!

    One question: how does this relate to Unk? There seems to be quite a bit of overlap between the two projects.

  2. @Ian

    core.cache is built from Clache which was the backing store for Unk’s memoization caches. Now core.cache is the backing for core.memoize.

  3. Ah, that makes sense. I’ve used Unk in a couple of personal POC projects but hadn’t looked into it’s deps so didn’t realise that it was built on top of Clache.

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