event based timer

[David Nadlinger]

On 7/20/11 12:05 PM, Martin Nowak wrote:
> It would be really better if phobos had some kind of timer. The thread
> solution is really suboptimal.

I think a major problem when trying to implement a general-purpose 
solution is that, by its very nature, a timer depends on the event 
handling scheme used.

For example, if you wanted to use a timer on Posix to interrupt your 
potentially blocking system calls, you would use alarm() to set a 
signal-based timeout and register a signal handler for it. On the other 
hand, a typical GUI application has its own event loop to integrate 
with, for an application using non-blocking I/O, you would like to 
transparently map your timers on select()/… timeout arguments, etc.

David