Lots of progress from yesterday's modest start of building data types for
scheduling. Last night I wrote the hairy calendar code to calculate when
next to run a scheduled event. (This is actually quite superior to cron
,
which checks every second to see if it should run each event!) Today I
built a "Cronner" thread that handles spawning threads to handle each
scheduled event. It even notices when changes have been made to the its
schedule and stops/starts event threads appropriately.
Everything is hooked up, building, and there's a good chance it works without too many bugs, but while I've tested all the pure code (mostly automatically with quickcheck properties), I have not run the Cronner thread at all. And there is some tricky stuff in there, like noticing that the machine was asleep past when it expected to wake up, and deciding if it should still run a scheduled event, or should wait until next time. So tomorrow we'll see..
Today's work was sponsored by Ethan Aubin.
The SysV Unix cron learned this same thing in 1979.
However, if you strace a traditional cron, you will be sad at how it's implemented. So much statting of files, and checking of entries every second..
0 polling or redundant calulcation in my code!