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The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby

A long time ago, I wrote a memoization library for Ruby. It was not easy, but I learned a great deal in the process. In this article, I am share these learnings and showing you how deep the memoization rabbit hole goes.

This is a more accurate way than using Time.now, because the monotonic clock is not affected by small shifts that occur e.g. when synchronising with a network time server. In Ruby, method definitions return the mehod name as a symbol, so memo­ize can be stuck in front of the def keyword and the memo­ize :fib line removed: Unfortunately, in the excitement of finding an approach to support memoization for frozen objects, a bigger problem has appeared: memory usage.

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