#tmcache

It’s time to be honest with ourselves and put TMCache into “maintenance mode.”

What’s wrong with TMCache, you say? Hopefully not a whole lot, we just need to spend our time and effort working on other projects. If we’re not going to be the kinds of maintainers that we think this project deserves, we’d rather make this clear than have its future be murky. We take a ton of pride in projects that brandish the Tumblr name and plan to do more open source work in the very near future.

While we do use TMCache in Tumblr.app, we’ve never used it particularly heavily. TMCache was actually developed by Justin Ouellette while prototyping a different application altogether, and while we were thrilled to have it land in our laps, there are parts of TMCache that we don’t rely upon internally. This has made it hard for us to be good stewards when it comes to changing the library, either by fixing bugs or adding new features. It kinda just works for our needs, and lots of others already depend on and like it as well. But if you’re looking for a library whose maintainers are going to be more hands-on, you have a right to know that this isn’t going to be it.

So what’s next?

The README has been updated to indicate that the project is no longer under active development. Soon, we’ll do a sweep through the outstanding issues and pull requests and either merge them, add our own fixes, or mark them as “won’t fix.”

We’d love for you to keep reporting bugs (or opening pull requests to fix them) going forward, but we’ll be shying away from anything that would change the library too drastically.

What should I use instead?

Great question. We plan to keep shipping TMCache to Tumblr.app’s millions of users for the foreseeable future, and don’t think there’s any real reason to switch away from it if it’s working well for you.

TMCache was intentionally kept small and conceptually simple. If you find it lacking, we hope it’s easy enough to read through and understand the code, in order to craft a solution that better fits your needs.

Of course, we recognize the value in using a well-maintained, popular, open source library. Here are some options that look particularly good to us (although we haven’t used all of them personally):

FastImageCache

Haneke

PINCache – a TMCache fork which attempts to fix thread-starvation issues that can occur due to TMCache being asyncronous by default

SDWebImage

Thank you!