Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization

"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.

I never understood about cache invalidation or naming things

Both are not that difficult, honestly.

Aren’t there a lot harder things out there

Really? Have you tried building any substantial program that makes use of caching and succeeded in invalidating the cache both correctly and efficiently? It's not all about simple things like disk access, caching is also useful in software that models complex hardware where properties depend on multitudes of interconnected calculated values that are time consuming to calculate and where you cannot predict which ones the client will ask for next.

Yes, I have. I've actually built a general-purpose cache system. Several, in fact:

Here's one for PHP: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/classes/...

And here is for the Web: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/dc95bd85fa386e45546b0b...

I also discuss caching in the context of HTTP: https://community.qbix.com/t/caching-and-sessions/192

  WRITING ABOUT CACHING AND INVALIDATION

You should especially start here: https://community.qbix.com/t/qbix-websites-loading-quickly/2...

And then you can read about incremental updates: https://community.qbix.com/t/streams-plugin-messages-subscri...

Your implementations are not cache systems: they are key-value store abstractions which can be used for caching. There is a simpler one in most languages (IIRC, named "hashes" in PHP).

Caching becomes hard when such a stores are used in distributed or concurrent contexts.

An example: imagine Qcache being used when fetching data from an SQL database. And data in the database changes with a direct SQL query from another process.

How will your key-value store know that the value in it is stale and needs refreshing?

Yes, they are cache systems. And as you say, they can be used for caching.

Caching systems know when something needs updating several ways. One is pubsub: When the information is loaded from the cache, you want to set up a realtime websocket or webhook for example, to reflect any changes since the cached info was shown. If you can manage to have a server running, you can simply receive new data (deltas) and update your cached data — in that case you can even have it ready and never stale by the time it is shown.

If you can’t run a server and don’t want to reveive pushes then another approach simply involves storing the latest ordinal or state for EACH cached item locally (e-tags does this) and then before rendering (or right after you do) bulk-sending the tags and seeing what has been updated, then pulling just that. The downside is that you may have a flash of old content if you show it optimistically.

If you combine the two methods, you can easily get an up-to-date syndication of a remote mutable data store.

My whole framework is built around such abstractions, to take care of them for people.