Crate minuteurs

A very lightweight crate to give users control as fine grained as possible over threads’ execution over time at a minimal cost.

Deadlines

A Deadline allow users to block a thread’s execution until a certain amount of time passed since the creation of the deadline unless the deadline already expired.

It comes in two flavors:

• Deadline::once() returns a Deadline that can be triggered only once meaning that once such a deadline expires, it can never block anymore.
• Deadline::repeat() returns a Deadline that can be triggered multiple times. In this case, if too much time have passed between two Deadline::wait() calls, it will try to catch up.

Examples

Basic example

use std::time::{Duration, Instant};

// Create a new deadline of 1 second.
let mut deadline = Deadline::once(Duration::from_secs(1));
let mut now = Instant::now();

// This sleep represents some heavy computation.
std::thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(750));

// Blocks the thread if less than 1 second have passed since the deadline's creation.
deadline.wait();

// Until this point, at least 1 second have passed no matter what happened
// between the creation and the wait.
let elapsed = now.elapsed();
assert!(elapsed > Duration::from_secs(1));
println!("elapsed: {elapsed:?}");

Possible output:

elapsed: 1.00010838s

Using a deadline to synchronize multiple threads

use std::time::{Duration, Instant};

// Create a repeatable deadline of 1 second.
let mut deadline = Deadline::repeat(Duration::from_secs(1));
let now = Instant::now();

// Spawn two threads with the same deadline.
// They should prints approximatively every 1s.
let thread1 = std::thread::spawn(move || {
    for _ in 0..5 {
        deadline.wait();
        let elapsed = now.elapsed();
        println!("thread1 ticked at {elapsed:?}",)
    }
});
let thread2 = std::thread::spawn(move || {
    for _ in 0..5 {
        deadline.wait();
        let elapsed = now.elapsed();
        println!("thread2 ticked at {elapsed:?}",)
    }
});

// Obligatory clean up.
let _ = thread1.join();
let _ = thread2.join();

Possible output:

thread2 ticked at 1.000112249s
thread1 ticked at 1.000112289s
thread2 ticked at 2.000107337s
thread1 ticked at 2.0001086s
thread2 ticked at 3.000101815s
thread1 ticked at 3.000641802s
thread1 ticked at 4.000100891s
thread2 ticked at 4.000100911s
thread2 ticked at 5.000106159s
thread1 ticked at 5.000112471s

Timer

A Timer differs from a repeatable Deadline in that a timer is specifically build to synchronize multiple threads on periodic events and are more precise and better optimized.

Usually, the timer runs in a loop in its own thread, while the Watchers are passed in another threads. The timer ticks periodically and notifies one or more watchers.

Example

use std::sync::atomic::{AtomicBool, Ordering};
use std::sync::Arc;
use std::time::{Duration, Instant};

// Create a timer that ticks every seconds and get a watcher from it.
let mut timer = Timer::new(Duration::from_secs(1));
let mut watcher1 = timer.watcher();

// Watchers are clonable and cloned ones are associated to the orignal watcher's timer.
// The timer will then notify the watcher2 as well.
let mut watcher2 = watcher1.clone();

let now = Instant::now();
let stop = Arc::new(AtomicBool::default());

// Spawn two threads.
// They should prints approximatively every 1s.
let stop_clone = Arc::clone(&stop);
let thread1 = std::thread::spawn(move || {
    while !stop_clone.load(Ordering::SeqCst) {
        if watcher1.has_ticked() {
            let elapsed = now.elapsed();
            println!("thread1 ticked at {elapsed:?}",)
        }
    }
});

let stop_clone = Arc::clone(&stop);
let thread2 = std::thread::spawn(move || {
    while !stop_clone.load(Ordering::SeqCst) {
        if watcher2.has_ticked() {
            let elapsed = now.elapsed();
            println!("thread2 ticked at {elapsed:?}",)
        }
    }
});

for _ in 0..5 {
    timer.tick();
}

stop.store(true, Ordering::SeqCst);

// Obligatory clean up.
let _ = thread1.join();
let _ = thread2.join();

Possible output:

thread1 ticked at 1.00087579s
thread2 ticked at 1.000878295s
thread1 ticked at 2.000870603s
thread2 ticked at 2.000873087s
thread2 ticked at 3.000875413s
thread1 ticked at 3.000876254s
thread2 ticked at 4.000874293s
thread1 ticked at 4.000875034s
thread2 ticked at 5.000874695s
thread1 ticked at 5.000875316s

Structs

• Deadline
  A deadline that can either be triggered once or multiple times.
• Timer
  A timer that ticks at a periodic time.
• Watcher
  A handle associated to a Timer that is notified when the timer ticks.