Recipe: Caches (#241)

Co-authored-by: Benjamin Friedman Wilson <[email protected]>

Author: Lotes

hugo/content/docs/recipes/performance/_index.md

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+---
+title: "Performance"
+weight: 175
+---

hugo/content/docs/recipes/performance/caches.md

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+---
+title: "Caches"
+weight: 0
+---
+
+## What is the problem?
+
+You have parsed a document and you would like to execute some computation on the AST. But you don’t want to do this every time you see a certain node. You want to do it once for the lifetime of a document. Where to save it?
+
+## How to solve it?
+
+For data that depends on the lifetime of a document or even the entire workspace, Langium has several kinds of caches:
+
+* the document cache saves key-value-pairs of given types `K` and `V` for each document. If the document gets changed or deleted the cache gets cleared automatically for the single files
+* the workspace cache also saves key-value-pairs of given types `K` and `V`, but gets cleared entirely when something in the workspace gets changed
+
+Besides those specific caches, Langium also provides:
+
+* a simple cache that can be used for any kind of key-value-data
+* a context cache that stores a simple cache for each context object. The document cache and workspace cache are implemented using the context cache
+
+## How to use it?
+
+Here we will use the `HelloWorld` example from the learning section. Let's keep it simple and just list people in a document, which will come from a comic book.
+
+We will have a computation for each person that determines from which publisher it comes from.
+
+### Add a database
+
+Let's build a "publisher inferer service". First let's create a small database of known publishers and known persons:
+
+```typescript
+type KnownPublisher = 'DC' | 'Marvel' | 'Egmont';
+const KnownPersonNames: Record<KnownPublisher, string[]> = {
+    DC: ['Superman', 'Batman', 'Aquaman', 'Wonderwoman', 'Flash'],
+    Marvel: ['Spiderman', 'Wolverine', 'Deadpool'],
+    Egmont: ['Asterix', 'Obelix']
+};
+```
+
+### Define the computation service
+
+For our service we define an interface:
+
+```typescript
+export interface InferPublisherService {
+    inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined;
+}
+```
+
+Now we implement the service:
+
+```typescript
+class UncachedInferPublisherService implements InferPublisherService {
+    inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined {
+        for (const [publisher, persons] of Object.entries(KnownPersonNames)) {
+            if (persons.includes(person.name)) {
+                return publisher as KnownPublisher;
+            }
+        }
+        return undefined;
+    }
+}
+```
+
+### Add a cache
+
+Now we want to cache the results of the `inferPublisher` method. We can use the `DocumentCache` for this. We will reuse the uncached service as base class and override the `inferPublisher` method:
+
+```typescript
+export class CachedInferPublisherService extends UncachedInferPublisherService {
+    private readonly cache: DocumentCache<Person, KnownPublisher | undefined>;
+    constructor(services: HelloWorldServices) {
+        super();
+        this.cache = new DocumentCache(services.shared);
+    }
+    override inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined {
+        const documentUri = AstUtils.getDocument(person).uri;
+        //get cache entry for the documentUri and the person
+        //if it does not exist, calculate the value and store it
+        return this.cache.get(documentUri, person, () => super.inferPublisher(person));
+    }
+}
+```
+
+### Use the service
+
+To use this service, let's create a validator that checks if the publisher of a person is known. Go to the `hello-world-validator.ts` file and add the following code:
+
+```typescript
+import type { ValidationAcceptor, ValidationChecks } from 'langium';
+import type { HelloWorldAstType, Person } from './generated/ast.js';
+import type { HelloWorldServices } from './hello-world-module.js';
+import { InferPublisherService } from './infer-publisher-service.js';
+
+/**
+ * Register custom validation checks.
+ */
+export function registerValidationChecks(services: HelloWorldServices) {
+    const registry = services.validation.ValidationRegistry;
+    const validator = services.validation.HelloWorldValidator;
+    const checks: ValidationChecks<HelloWorldAstType> = {
+        Person: validator.checkPersonIsFromKnownPublisher
+    };
+    registry.register(checks, validator);
+}
+
+/**
+ * Implementation of custom validations.
+ */
+export class HelloWorldValidator {
+    private readonly inferPublisherService: InferPublisherService;
+
+    constructor(services: HelloWorldServices) {
+        this.inferPublisherService = services.utilities.inferPublisherService;
+    }
+
+    checkPersonIsFromKnownPublisher(person: Person, accept: ValidationAcceptor): void {
+        if (!this.inferPublisherService.inferPublisher(person)) {
+            accept('warning', `"${person.name}" is not from a known publisher.`, {
+                node: person
+            });
+        }
+    }
+
+}
+```
+
+### Register the service
+
+Finally, we need to register the service in the module. Go to the `hello-world-module.ts` file and add the following code:
+
+```typescript
+export type HelloWorldAddedServices = {
+    utilities: {
+        inferPublisherService: InferPublisherService
+    },
+    validation: {
+        HelloWorldValidator: HelloWorldValidator
+    }
+}
+//...
+export const HelloWorldModule: Module<HelloWorldServices, PartialLangiumServices & HelloWorldAddedServices> = {
+    utilities: {
+        inferPublisherService: (services) => new CachedInferPublisherService(services)
+    },
+    validation: {
+        //add `services` parameter here
+        HelloWorldValidator: (services) => new HelloWorldValidator(services)
+    }
+};
+```
+
+### Test the result
+
+Start the extension and create a `.hello` file with several persons, like this one:
+
+```plaintext
+person Wonderwoman
+person Spiderman
+person Homer //warning: unknown publisher!!
+person Obelix
+```
+
+## Last words
+
+Caching can improve the performance of your language server. It is especially useful for computations that are expensive to calculate. The `DocumentCache` and `WorkspaceCache` are the most common caches to use. The `ContextCache` is useful if you need to store data for a specific context object. If you only need a key-value store, you can use the `SimpleCache`.
+All of these caches are disposable compared to a simple `Map<K, V>`. If you dispose them by calling `dispose()` the entries will be removed and the memory will be freed. Plus, from the moment you have called `dispose()`, the cache will not react to changes in the workspace anymore.
+
+## Appendix
+
+<details>
+<summary>Full implementation</summary>
+
+```typescript
+import { AstUtils, DocumentCache } from "langium";
+import { Person } from "./generated/ast.js";
+import { HelloWorldServices } from "./hello-world-module.js";
+
+type KnownPublisher = 'DC' | 'Marvel' | 'Egmont';
+const KnownPersonNames: Record<KnownPublisher, string[]> = {
+    DC: ['Superman', 'Batman', 'Aquaman', 'Wonderwoman', 'Flash'],
+    Marvel: ['Spiderman', 'Wolverine', 'Deadpool'],
+    Egmont: ['Asterix', 'Obelix']
+};
+
+export interface InferPublisherService {
+    inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined;
+}
+
+class UncachedInferPublisherService implements InferPublisherService {
+    inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined {
+        for (const [publisher, persons] of Object.entries(KnownPersonNames)) {
+            if (persons.includes(person.name)) {
+                return publisher as KnownPublisher;
+            }
+        }
+        return undefined;
+    }
+}
+
+export class CachedInferPublisherService extends UncachedInferPublisherService {
+    private readonly cache: DocumentCache<Person, KnownPublisher | undefined>;
+    constructor(services: HelloWorldServices) {
+        super();
+        this.cache = new DocumentCache(services.shared);
+    }
+    override inferPublisher(person: Person): KnownPublisher | undefined {
+        const documentUri = AstUtils.getDocument(person).uri;
+        return this.cache.get(documentUri, person, () => super.inferPublisher(person));
+    }
+}
+```
+
+</details>