ExpiringRef

Not directly related to events, but a useful primitive nonetheless, an ExpiringRef is a concurrently available value that expires after a certain period of time. When using event sourcing in particular, it can be helpful to “cache” event state in memory so that your application is not continuously reading from the event log every time it needs the latest state for something. This abstraction uses an internal timer that resets after each use so that lifetime management of your state is automated.

Here is a simple example:

import cats.effect.IO
import dev.rpeters.fs2.es.data.ExpiringRef
import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.global
import scala.concurrent.duration._

implicit val cs = IO.contextShift(global)
implicit val timer = IO.timer(global)

val timedRef = for {
  res <- ExpiringRef[IO].timed(1, 2.seconds)
  firstResult <- res.use(i => IO.pure(i + 1))
  _ <- res.expired
  secondResult <- res.use(i => IO.pure(i + 2))
} yield (firstResult, secondResult)

timedRef.unsafeRunSync()
// res0: (Option[Int], Option[Int]) = (Some(value = 2), None)

There is also a variant ExpiringRef[F].uses that lets you specify a maximum number of uses, but you may find the timed variant to be more practical for event sourcing.