Originalmente publicado el 21 de Febrero de 2014

One of the beautiful things about Open Source it’s just to build something you want ONLY because you want it.

Everyone has a mentor or at least references, people you admire. On top of my list are soveran, cyx and inkel and thanks to their guidance I’m a big advocate of small libraries with clear responsibilities.

With that in mind I made Twitcher wich is basically a wrapper on top of the Go time.NewTicker function.

How does it work?

twitcher := twitcher.NewTwitcher(time.Second * 30)
twitcher.Do(func() {
  println("I'm going to be executed every 30 seconds")
})

But that’s just slightly different from using Go stdlib Ticker…

Yes, this would be the example using it:

t := time.NewTicker(time.Second * 30)
go func() {
  for {
    <-t.C
    println("I'm going to be executed every 30 seconds")
  }
}()

But the catch comes when you want to update the “ticking”.

You can’t just modify the channel you need to wrap it in something and that’s what Twitcher does. Let’s you easily modify the reference to the channel.

And for that reason Twitcher exists. To have an Update and an easy way to execute a function on each tick.

twitcher.Update(time.Second * 5)

Will change the execution time of the function.

And you can Stop the function just by calling it.

twitcher.Stop()

Sometimes you want to access the channel to do your own stuff. And you can:

for {
  <-twitcher.C
}

I hope you find this helpful.