SimpleCaching

This package provides two macros used to cache result(s) of function calls.

The cached file will survive the julia session so it will be automatically loaded from the disk even after a restart of the julia session.

Differences with other packages

Most packages that provide caching functionality offers macros that are strictly bounded to function definitions (e.g. Caching.jl)); this means that if, for example, a println is added to a function definition the cached file will not be loaded. To work around this problem, the macros exposed by this package only use the function name and the value of the parameters at the time of the call to determine if the result can be loaded from the cache, if any.

Installation

This packages is registered so you can install it executing the following commands in a Julia REPL to install it:

import Pkg
Pkg.add("SimpleCaching")

or, to install the developement version, run:

import Pkg
Pkg.add("https://github.com/ferdiu/SimpleCaching.jl#dev")

Usage

Start using the macros as follow:

julia> using SimpleCaching

julia> SimpleCaching.settings.log = true; # log when saving/loading cache

julia> @scache "cute-cube" "./" fill(0, 3, 3, 3)
● [ 2022-12-09 15:39:42 ] Computing cute-cube...
● [ 2022-12-09 15:39:42 ] Computed cute-cube in 0.009 seconds (00:00:00)
● [ 2022-12-09 15:39:44 ] Saving cute-cube to file ./cute-cube_4bbf9c2851f2c2b3954448f1a8085f6e3d40085add71f19640343885a8b7bd6a.jld[.tmp]...
3×3×3 Array{Int64, 3}:
[:, :, 1] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

[:, :, 2] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

[:, :, 3] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

if the same function will be called again with the same parameters this will result in the cache to be loaded instead of performing the calculation again.

The cache is saved on the disk so it will be loaded even in subsequent julia sessions making these macros particularly useful whene executing long calculations inside cycles withing Julia scripts).


julia> @scache "cute-cube" "./" fill(0, 3, 3, 3)
● [ 2022-12-09 15:39:56 ] Loading cute-cube from file ./cute-cube_4bbf9c2851f2c2b3954448f1a8085f6e3d40085add71f19640343885a8b7bd6a.jld...
3×3×3 Array{Int64, 3}:
[:, :, 1] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

[:, :, 2] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

[:, :, 3] =
 0  0  0
 0  0  0
 0  0  0

See Macros section for more details on how to use them.

Settings

Some behaviour of the macros can be tweaked chaning the values of the settings:

SimpleCaching.SimpleCachingSettings — Type

SimpleCachingSettings is a struct containing settings for exported macros @scache and @scachefast.

Fields

log: a Bool indicating whether to log or not operations like computing, saving and loading. Default is false.
log_output: a IO containing the file descriptor the log will be written to; ignored if log is false. Default is stdout.
date_format: a String representing the format the DateTime will be printed when logging; ignored if log is false. Default is "yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS".
line_started: a String that will be placed at the beginning of the log; ignored if log is false. Default is "● ".
create_cache_record: a Bool indicating whether to create a tsv file containing human readable informations about the saved file. Default is false;
cache_dir: this is the default directory the cache will be saved in when not specified in the macro call. Default is ./_sc_cache.

source