> some technical decisions are absurd, such as the worker's cache.delete method, which only clears the cache contents in the data center where the Worker was invoked!!!
The Cache API is a standard taken from browsers. In the browser, cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world. You could certainly argue that a global purge would be more useful in Workers, but it would be inconsistent with the standard API behavior, and also would be extraordinarily expensive. Code designed to use the standard cache API would end up being much more expensive than expected.
With all that said, we (Workers team) do generally feel in retrospect that the Cache API was not a good fit for our platform. We really wanted to follow standards, but this standard in this case is too specific to browsers and as a result does not work well for typical use cases in Cloudflare Workers. We'd like to replace it with something better.
>cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world.
To me, it only makes sense if the put method creates a cache only in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked. Put and delete need to be related, in my opinion.
Now I'm curious: what's the point of clearing the cache contents in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked? I can't think of any use for this method.
My criticisms aren't about functionality per see or developers. I don't doubt the developers' competence, but I feel like there's something wrong with the company culture.
> To me, it only makes sense if the put method creates a cache only in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked. Put and delete need to be related, in my opinion.
That is, in fact, how it works. cache.put() only writes to the local datacenter's cache. If delete() were global, it would be inconsistent with put().
> Now I'm curious: what's the point of clearing the cache contents in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked? I can't think of any use for this method.
Say you read the cache entry but you find, based on its content, that it is no longer valid. You would then want to delete it, to save the cost of reading it again later.
The Cache API is a standard taken from browsers. In the browser, cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world. You could certainly argue that a global purge would be more useful in Workers, but it would be inconsistent with the standard API behavior, and also would be extraordinarily expensive. Code designed to use the standard cache API would end up being much more expensive than expected.
With all that said, we (Workers team) do generally feel in retrospect that the Cache API was not a good fit for our platform. We really wanted to follow standards, but this standard in this case is too specific to browsers and as a result does not work well for typical use cases in Cloudflare Workers. We'd like to replace it with something better.