Often you'll want to cache objects in your app. You might do it for many reasons such as avoiding expensive calculations or to reducing unnecessary network access. If you are using NSMutableDictionary for this, you'll definitely want to look into NSCache for caches.

The key benefit of NSCache over NSMutableDictionary when used as a cache is the former will automatically evict objects from itself appropriately when there's low memory pressure.

Using NSCache is easy. If you don't use subscript-indexing syntax for NSDictionary/NSMutableDictionary, you'll cover almost all cases by just replacing NSMutableDictionary with NSCache.

If you use subscript-indexing, you can add the following extension:

@interface NSCache(NSCache_extension)

- (id)objectForKeyedSubscript:(id)key;
- (void)setObject:(id)object forKeyedSubscript:(id<NSCopying>)key;

@end

@implementation NSCache(NSCache_extension)

- (id)objectForKeyedSubscript:(id)key {
    return [self objectForKey:key];
}

- (void)setObject:(id)object forKeyedSubscript:(id<NSCopying>)key {
    [self setObject:object forKey:key];
}

@end

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