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ruby tricks: simple caching of method results

This is a simple trick based on the idea that everything in ruby returns a result. By using the block syntax we can do a series of expensive operations and cache the result somewhere. Here I’ve shown the result cached in an instance variable but it may just as well be something more exotic.

  def caching_method
    @result || begin
      # expensive operation
      foo = expensive_operation_1
      @result = expensive_operation_2 * foo
    end
  end