5 ms·
So... a cache. You keep track of a bounded number of items, and can avoid doing some work when a currently-tracked item shows up again.
by Strilanc 11y ago
So... a cache. You keep track of a bounded number of items, and can avoid doing some work when a currently-tracked item shows up again.
- eridius 11y agoThe first footnote in the article says: > [1] It’s been 3 years since I wrote this article, and every time it pops back up people are like “so, a cache”, and every time I’m like “that wasn’t obvious from context?” and so now I’ve added this text.
- Strilanc 11y agoI missed that. It certainly wasn't clear to me from the rest of the post that the author realized they were talking about a cache. Possibly because I'd be tempted to make that the focus, since I consider "by the way we just re-invented the cache by accident!" to be an excellent climax-twist on a post like this. You think it's about this cool new data structure, but then it's actually about thinking from the ground up or about reasoning from multiple perspectives.