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134 points samuel246 | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 10:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source

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ckdot2 ◴[03 Jul 25 19:03 UTC] No.44458190[source]▶

"I think now caching is probably best understood as a tool for making software simpler" - that's cute. Caching might be beneficial for many cases, but if it doesn't do one thing then this is simplifying software. There's that famous quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.", and, sure, it's a bit ironical, but there's some truth in there.

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1. hatthew ◴[03 Jul 25 22:25 UTC] No.44459654[source]▶

>>44458190 #

If you have a system with "slow storage", caching is a way to optimize that to "storage that is sometimes fast".

If you have a system with "slow storage" and "fast storage", caching is a way to abstract that away to just "storage".

The author is arguing that the latter is the default way we should think about the concept of caching, which is a valid opinion to have.

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Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization