[wp-hackers] Caching as part of the core

[Otto]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 1:59 AM, Mike Schinkel <mike at newclarity.net> wrote:
> On Jul 24, 2012, at 2:44 AM, Bryan Petty wrote:
>> Since you brought it up though, maybe we should discuss how developers
>> can't actually write page caching plugins without writing their own
>> persistent cache system included in their plugins currently because the
>> object cache in core has been entirely useless for that since 2008. This
>> isn't even a question of whether a page caching plugin would use it or
>> not, *all* page caching plugins require a persistent cache.
>
> The Transients API[1] would potentially be something that persistent storage could be based on using hooks.
>
> But alas, it is loaded *after* advanced-cache.php and it depends on the hooks system, which is loaded even later.  Yet another example of how caching is hard to implement in WordPress because core has never needed to address these issues.

The transients API *uses* the object cache if it's set to be external.
Any plugin could behave in the same manner.

I guess I'm not getting at what you even want here. The Object Cache
API is solid and works well. Transients exist for persistent timed
storage, and leverage plugins that implement persistent object
caching. There's great plugins out there to implement persistent
object caching, and any of them can be easily used for various
purposes.

What more is needed? You speak about adding a caching API of some
sort, but you completely fail to address what actually is in this
magical API that would be useful or even valuable.

-Otto