Add Caching to Any Python Function in One Line

Did you know that Python actually has built-in decorators that can add a cache to any function? (what are decorators?)

Let's say I have a function that requires a bit a computing power. For this example, I'll use a fibonacci sequence calculator.

def fib(x): if x <= 1: return 1 return fib(x - 1) + fib(x) 

Using Python's builtin functools library, I can add a "cache" in one line. A cache will remember the outputs of a compute-heavy function so the values don't need to be calculated multiple times.

If a set of inputs have already been calculated, the cache decorator will return the calculated result without running the fib() function.

 from functools import cache @cache def fib(x): if x <= 1: return 1 return fib(x - 1) + fib(x) 

However, @cache will store an unlimited number of inputs and outputs. If we want to limit it to only, say, 1,000 cached values, we can use a "least-recently-used" or "LRU" cache.

With this type of cache, Python will only cache the 1,000 most recently used values. If a new value is calculated, the 1,001st value will be "evicted" from the cache (removed from memory).

Example 1 (note that we do not need parentheses):

 from functools import lru_cache @lru_cache def fib(x): if x <= 1: return 1 return fib(x - 1) + fib(x) 

Example 2 (maximum size of 1000 elements):

 from functools import lru_cache @lru_cache(max_size=1000) def fib(x): if x <= 1: return 1 return fib(x - 1) + fib(x)