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Comment by eddtries | Hacker News Reader

The thing that made me love Golang was the Time channel, where you can have a channel execute a function every X milliseconds, without having to worry about blocking threads with time.sleep() etc. It made a lot of stuff I wanted to write so much easier I basically went all in on Go and haven't regretted it.

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That one is actually pretty easy in JavaScript - in the past I've implemented the same sort of behavior using async generators.

(I also like Go's time.Ticker behavior quite a lot)

Do you have an example? For my case it was an internal lambda service that could add functions with specific intervals to the time.Ticker match, basically you edit a config to add a path to an executable and an interval and then I added it to my script

Sure do, I haven't actually used this one (I implemented it just then) but it should do the trick: https://gist.github.com/joeycumines/6206f2a6cd79875c7c164738...

Actually, it was fun, so I've made it into an actual package.

The one I slapped together works, but this one is better (fixes issues with actually stopping it properly): https://github.com/joeycumines/generator-ticker

On NPM as generator-ticker.

Thanks!

Addendum: My first attempt would drift over time, if the receiver was slow.

Hurt my head a little, but it's fixed now, and I'm at least moderately confident it's correct - unit tested the behavior step by step using `ts-chan`, actually. Will probably use that test as another example use case.

How is it different from setInterval in JS?

Technically speaking? Go has parallelism by default, I suppose. But if your functions take negligible time to execute and the interval is sufficiently large enough then nothing from a user perspective.

Yeah I was designing an internal lambda server so mostly parallelism, all I had to do was have a dynamic match and everything else was out the box for the load I needed

Yeah, I'm sure a well-written parallel Rust or C++ program (using just the CPU cores) can do better, but Go really hits a Pareto sweet spot in terms of "effort vs speedup" return on investment.

I’m not the best systems dev, when I get these options I pick easy!

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