[Biococoa-dev] Caching the NSArray of BCSymbol

[Charles Parnot]

> One question about design of this:  should we think about a caching  
> policy?
> Maybe have a boolean ivar that allows a sequence to retain its  
> symbol array
> at an app developer's discretion (defaults to NO, but can be  
> manually set to
> YES in cases where an app developer knows he'll need repeated  
> access to
> individual symbols).  It would let app developers make performance vs.
> memory decisions, instead of leaving them at the framework level.
>
> JT
>

I thought of that too initially, but more recently I thought:
* if the sequence is immutable, the developer could cache it outside  
of the framework, no need to do it in the framework
* if the sequence is mutable, caching means a lot of additional code  
to keep the array in sync for all the methods where the sequence  
changes; which probably means we should not do it now, but leave it  
for the future *if* the need arises.

Or the developer could be smart and know better than use NSArray when  
performance is needed ;-)

charles

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Charles Parnot
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