Dart: late + final = easy and safe caching

Let's say You have a Person class and You want to expose netWorth field.
There is a backend API to fetch it but it's pretty expensive.
Backend needs to call all associated bank APIs, convert currencies, calculate real estate values, etc.
Here's how to use new late variables feature to implement easy and safe caching.

Naive approach

We could start with super simple approach, i.e. fetch the value every time we use it.

class Person {
  Future<num> netWorth() => _fetchNetWorth();
}

// await person.netWorth()

Cache result

Instead of calling _fetchNetWorth every time we could call it only once and cache the results.

class Person {
  Future<num>? _fetchNetWorthFuture;

  Future<num> netWorth() {
    _fetchNetWorthFuture ??= _fetchNetWorth();

    return _fetchNetWorthFuture;
  }
}

// await person.netWorth()

There is an open question hanging in the air: why netWorth is Future<num> and not simply num?
We could have some initialization function that could resolve the future, right?

I'm not a fan of such initialization functions because it creates unnecesarry dependency that can quickly become unmanagable.

What if we have another field in the class that has to be fetched? We throw it in init function!

What if we need only one not the other? Should we have two init functions? Or maybe have some logic what to initialize?

Futures are cheap and I like the explicit contract that we expose. Consumer of our class knows from the get-go that this value has some cost.

Ok, now we cached the result (or rather Future of the result) so we don't make the expensive call again.
There is not much more we can do in terms of resource optimisation, but we can optimise the code a bit - we can get rid of the intermidiate _fetchNetWorthFuture variable.

late + final

With introduction of sound null-safty we got access to late keyword. late allows us to take responsibility of nullness of the value. It's like telling compiler "trust me, the value will be there when I use it".

The late modifier has some other special powers too. It may seem paradoxical, but you can use late on a field that has an initializer:
¹

Possibility to have initializer on late variables allows us to get rid of intermidiate _fetchNetWorthFuture variable.
Slapping final gives us compilte time guarantee that the variable will be assigned only once.

class Person {
  // Potentially expensive calculation.
  late final netWorth = _fetchNetWorth();
}

// await person.netWorth

This post was originally posted on my blog at stuffs.dev

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1. https://dart.dev/null-safety/understanding-null-safety#lazy-initialization ↩