From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2004-06-11T23:55:31+09:00
Subject: Re: The dangers of sleeping ...

Dale Martenson wrote:
> I guess when I think of sleeping. I don't see the relationship between
> sleeping for a particular length of time and what the clock says. This may
> be since I work with a lot embedded systems where tick counts are used to
> for timing events. Date and time information may or may not be available.

Right, and there's a vast difference between how things are done on 
embedded systems and on full-fledged OSes.  Especially when it comes to 
platform-neutral languages like Ruby, they very rarely have access to 
low-level system services, like real time clocks.

To be portable, Ruby probably uses system services that are at as high a 
level of abstraction as possible.  Since I'm pretty sure there are no 
platform-independant ways of doing rtc-style timing, I would guess Ruby 
relies on the system clock.

> I just thought it was odd that it wasn't accounted for and that its behavior
> varied depending on if it was in a thread or not.

Yeah, I guess it is odd, but I'd consider it a corner case.  If you want 
to look at how sleep is implemented under the hood in Ruby, you're 
welcome to do it.  If you can suggest a better way of doing it, so that 
it is able to deal with the system clock getting changed by a huge 
amount, that would be great!

Ben