Memonic

Introduction

Memonic is a very simple, lightweight memoization helper. The simplest way to use it is with the memoize class method.

class MyClass
  include Memonic

  memoize :value do
    an_expensive_computation
  end
end

This defines an instance method named value on MyClass that is the equivalent of:

def value
  unless defined? @value
    @value = an_expensive_computation
  end
  @value
end

Note that unlike the more usual @value ||= computation pattern, Memonic guarantees that the computation is only executed once, even if it returns nil or false.

memoize is also available as an instance method. I'm not entirely sure why you would want to use it, but if you do, here's how:

class MyClass
  include Memonic

  def value
    memoize(:@value) { an_expensive_computation }
  end
end

Note that the '@' prefix is necessary.

Background

Memoization is a common optimization technique in which the result of a potentially expensive computation is captured the first time a function is invoked and the cached result is used for subsequent invocations. In Ruby it's usually expressed as follows:

class MyClass
  def value
    @value ||= an_expensive_computation
  end
end

This is simple and well-understood, but suffers from a fairly serious flaw: if the computation result is nil or false, then the full computation will be performed on every call to value. In most cases this is not an issue - either the computation in question never yields a "falsey" result, or it's not so expensive that it matters if it's repeated a few times. For cases where these issues are a concern, the usual solution is to first check whether the cached result actually exists:

def value
  unless defined?(@value)
    @value = an_expensive_computation
  end
  @value
end

This does the job, but it's verbose and not very idiomatic. Memonic does pretty much exactly this internally, but dresses it in a convenient, idiomatic syntax.

Alternatives

There are a couple of gems that offer similar functionality. Most of these are intended to replace ActiveSupport::Memoizable, which was deprecated way back in Rails 3.2 for being an overly complex solution to a relatively simple problem. The Memoizable-style gems use a slightly different syntax from Memonic. You define your method, then mark it for memoization:

class MyClass
  extend Memoist

  def value
    an_expensive_computation
  end
  memoize :value
end

If you prefer this approach, then you should totally use something like Memoist or Memoizable.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'memonic'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install memonic

Contributing

Fork it (http://github.com/johncarney/memonic/fork)
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request