memopy 0.0.1

Memoize / cache function call results

Store results of functions calls so that subsequent calls with the same arguments do not have to redo work.

This strategy of memoizing past results is only fully correct with “pure functions”. Pure functions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function) are functions that, when run with the same arguments, always return the same result. They should not have any side effects (e.g. modifying global variables, writing to an external database), or depend on anything besides the parameters (e.g. a random number generator, reading from an external database). Typically any mathematically-defined function (fibonacci, factorial, sine, cosine, etc.) is a pure function.

But MemoPy can be useful with impure functions, too, when perfect correctness is not required. For example, it can be used to cache the results of network calls to external API’s, to avoid repeating expensive network requests (but the cache should be cleared when it is necessary to get completely up to date information).

Use

Import the memoify decorator:

from memopy.memopy import memoify

Apply the memoify decorator to a function to turn that function into a memo function:

@memoify
def multiply(x, y):
    return x * y

Subsequent calls to multiply with the same args will not perform the multiplication, but rather look up the past answer.

Multiplying numbers is not a typical use case, so take a look at a function which is inherently reused on the same arguments a lot:

@memoify
def fibo(n):
    if n in [0, 1]:
        return n
    return fibo(n-1) + fibo(n-2)

Without memoization, some values of the fibonacci sequence would be computed an exponential number of times. With the single line @memoify, for a given n every computation after the first will be replaced with a lookup. Check out the difference between the above memoified version of fibo and the regular version of that same function:

def regular_fibo(n):
    if n in [0, 1]:
        return n
    return regular_fibo(n-1) + regular_fibo(n-2)

See how the difference grows as n grows larger. (For me, for example, with n = 30, the difference is already very noticable, and with n = 100, regular_fibo takes forever while the memoized fibo is still instant.)

Hashability

Function arguments are not required to be hashable, but they should be for best (fastest) results. If they are not, the memoizing version of the function could become slower than the original under special circumstances (depending on the runtime of the original function, and the number and nature of different arguments the memoizing version has been called with).

Concurrency

MemoPy was not designed with concurrency in mind. So multiple runs of the same function in different threads at the same time is advised against as it has not been thoroughly thought through what would happen.

Documentation

The tests found on Github at https://github.com/tscizzle/memopy/tree/master/tests give some examples and showcase the library’s functionality.

Installation

If you don’t have pip, get pip at: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing

Run the command pip install memopy in your terminal to get the MemoPy library.

To test your installation, start a Python interpreter with the python command in your terminal and make sure you can run import memopy in it without getting an error.

Contribute

Find the code on Github at: https://github.com/tscizzle/memopy

Support

Contact me (Tyler Singer-Clark) at [e-mail] with any questions or concerns.

License

The project is licensed under the MIT license.