Hacker News Reader

Comment by phronesis | Hacker News Reader

> Apart from that, we've renamed cacheTime to gcTime to better reflect what it is doing

Does it though? Maybe it's super obvious to more experienced users, but now I need to read the docs to find out what "gc" stands for. Not a big deal, just seems like an unnecessary abbreviation, so I'm curious as to what the reasoning is.

View on HN

which is likely much better than making the wrong assumption because you know what "cache" means. Check the docs, cacheTime is very likely not doing what you expected.

A typical expectation would be that "cacheTime" controls how long react query uses the cached value before it tries to fetch that data again from the server. That part is actually controlled by "staleTime".

It's a fair point that I agree with. I meant more in terms of, why not just name it `garbageCollectTime`.

so cacheTime was really confusing because it seemed like "this is the amount time we cache data for", but that's not what it is. So a rename had to happen. We had some discussion on the public roadmap (https://github.com/TanStack/query/discussions/4252) about what it's gonna be. I'm usually against abbreviations, simply because there's always someone who doesn't understand what it means. But all other suggestions like inactiveCacheTime also had room for interpretation. gc is an abbreviation that is known well enough (think git gc), and it's also not an option that you will customize on a daily basis (usually once, globally).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com