naw / elixir-memoization-experiment

Naive newbie experiment with memoization in elixir

In Ruby we might have something like this:

module Specialties
  def self.specialties
    @specialties ||= ["Specialty One", "Specialty Two"]
  end
end

And we could call this from anywhere in the application:

def valid_specialty?(specialty)
  specialty.in?(Specialties.specialties)
end

In Elixir, we can have a Specialties module, but we can't memoize data:

defmodule Specialties do
  def specialties
    ["Specialty One", "Specialty Two"]
   end
end

This is a problem if the data comes from some expensive operation (like loading and parsing a file, for example)

We can use something like an Agent to hold this state, and we could definitely start the Agent in a supervisor, but this feels like a lot of overhead just to get simple memoization. From the perspective of the "consuming" code, it just wants to call Specialties.specialties, and from the perspective of the Specialties module, it really only cares about how to get the actual specialties, not how to memoize them in an Agent.

We could make a Specialties module that knows how to memoize the data in an Agent lazily (i.e. without a supervisor starting it up in advance) like this:

defmodule Specialties do

  defp load_specialties do
    ["Specialty One", "Specialty Two"]
  end

  defp start_link do
    Agent.start_link(fn -> nil end, name: :specialties)
  end

  defp get_and_set_specialties do
    data = load_specialties()
    Agent.update(:specialties, fn _ -> data end)
    data
  end

  def specialties do
    start_link()
    Agent.get(:specialties, fn state -> state end) || get_and_set_specialties()
  end

end

However, only the first function is actually interesting --- the last 3 functions are just boilerplate to deal with the Agent stuff and memoization. We could extract this boilerplate into a macro like this:

defmodule Memoizer do

  defmacro memoize(description, do: content) do
    quote do
      def load do
        unquote(content)
      end

      defp start_link do
        Agent.start_link(fn -> nil end, name: __MODULE__)
      end

      defp get_and_set do
        data = load()
        Agent.update(__MODULE__, fn _ -> data end)
        data
      end

      def(unquote(description)) do
        start_link()
        Agent.get(__MODULE__, fn state -> state end) || get_and_set()
      end
    end
  end

end

And then use it like this:

defmodule SpecialtiesViaMacro do
  import Memoizer

  memoize specialties() do
    ["Specialty Three", "Specialty Four"]
  end

end

Of course, in a multi-process environment, two processes could call Specialties.specialties at the same time, and they both might end up running the expensive calculation (which is true in the Ruby version too), but for quick and dirty memoization, especially for single-process Elixir code, this seems a lot simpler than always building an Agent and supervising it.

As a newbie to Elixir, I'm probably missing something here, so I probably won't actually use this approach, but I wanted to at least document the concept.