A portable Common Lisp timer wheel implementation. A timer wheel provides an efficient mechanism to implement tick-based timer routines. The portable part of this is the backend using Boreaux Threads to run a background thread operating the wheel.
Note that this package uses the internal-real-time to manage inter-tick timing intervals. Thus the correctness of the interval depends on how the specific lisp implementation implements internal-real-time. For instance, SBCL currently uses gettimeofday internally which means that a leap-second can stop time.
For the original reference I used, see "Real-Time Embedded Systems" by Xiaocong Fan, chapter 22.3. For some background on timers in Linux
(asdf:load-system :timer-wheel.examples)
;; Increment and print a counter value every tick with two different counters.
;; A third counter triggers the completion of the test.
(tw.examples:test 100 1500)I've tested on Windows with SBCL 1.3 and CCL 1.11. I could get a timer wheel running with a resolution of 20 milliseconds without overruns (Nothing else going on). If you start loading up the garbage collector, I'm guessing that you'll start getting overruns. Test to determine what works.
- Add a hierarchical timer wheel
- Add OS specific timer back-ends?
- HW timer backends?