multitick

README

multitick

This package is a wrapper around a single time.Ticker in the Go language, which provides a way for lots of listeners to subscribe to a single set of ticks. If a subscriber is busy and can't receive a tick, it will be discarded; the implementation is non-blocking. Additionally, ticks can be aligned to a specific boundary easily, which eliminates annoying code from your programs.

We use this functionality at VividCortex to help coordinate worker goroutines, driving them by passing them ticker channels. This makes the workers more testable, by avoiding nondeterministic use of time.Tick() inside them.

Documentation

Please read the generated package documentation.

Getting Started

Install multitick in the usual way:

go get github.com/VividCortex/multitick

And import it as usual:

import (
    "github.com/VividCortex/multitick"
)

To use multitick, create a ticker with the desired interval and offset. For example, to create a once-per-second ticker that will send at 750 milliseconds past the clock tick,

tick := multitick.NewTicker(time.Second, time.Millisecond*750)

If you want the ticker to start immediately instead of waiting, you can pass a negative number as the second parameter.

Now subscribe to ticks. Here's an example of starting worker routines with ticker channels:

go someFunc(tick.Subscribe())
go otherFunc(tick.Subscribe())

Contributing

We only accept pull requests for minor fixes or improvements. This includes:

• Small bug fixes
• Typos
• Documentation or comments

Please open issues to discuss new features. Pull requests for new features will be rejected, so we recommend forking the repository and making changes in your fork for your use case.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 VividCortex, licensed under the MIT license. Please see the LICENSE file for details.

Documentation

Overview

Package multitick broadcasts a time.Ticker to multiple receivers, all of which receive the same values, aligned to an offset.

Index

• type Ticker
  • func NewTicker(interval, offset time.Duration) *Ticker
  • func (t *Ticker) Dropped() int
  • func (t *Ticker) Stop()
  • func (t *Ticker) Subscribe() <-chan time.Time

Types

type Ticker

type Ticker struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

Ticker is a broadcaster for time.Time tick events.

func NewTicker

func NewTicker(interval, offset time.Duration) *Ticker

NewTicker creates and starts a new Ticker, whose ticks are sent to subscribers at the specified interval, delayed until the specified offset after the interval (there will be some imprecision). The first parameter is equivalent to "d" in time.NewTicker(d). If the offset is negative, ticking is not aligned to an offset, and begins immediately.

func (*Ticker) Dropped

func (t *Ticker) Dropped() int

Dropped returns the number of dropped ticks.

func (*Ticker) Stop

func (t *Ticker) Stop()

Stop stops the ticker. As in time.Ticker, it does not close channels.

func (*Ticker) Subscribe

func (t *Ticker) Subscribe() <-chan time.Time

Subscribe returns a channel to which ticks will be delivered. Ticks that can't be delivered to the channel, because it is not ready to receive, are discarded.