High resolution time scheduler

[Matthias Seemann]

Is that a useful perspective or option to increase the time resolution in Bacon.js?

What I'd like Bacon to do is:

// Rate limiting incoming data events on web sockets (prevents DOS attacks)
var incoming = Bacon.fromEvent(socket, 'message').map('.data'); // that works fine
var rateLimitedIncomingData = incoming.bufferWithTime(5)  // every 5 msecs
.map(R.take(20))    // maximum 20 events
.flatMap(events => Bacon.sequentially(5 / 20, events))  // that is 4 events per 1 msec evenly distributed

However I cannot do that because 5 / 20 = 0.25 is below the minimum time resolution of setTimeout in Node.js and the browser.

Is it useful at all to schedule function calls in JavaScript with a precision of many microseconds or is this diametrical to the event loop internals in Node.js or the browser?

While I could write quickly a Node.js C++ add-on for microsecond callbacks and hack Bacon.scheduler.setTimeout to use microsecond precision with my add-on, I wonder if anything would break with Bacon.js' scheduling?

Reason for wanting a C++ add-on:
All callback based high-resolution timeout libraries I've found are based on tight setImmediate loops querying high performance timers. That's to bad since they all suck up my CPU time!

[Juha Paananen]

Sounds interesting!

Bacon.js uses the Bacon.scheduler object for all scheduling so you can replace the scheduler object with a high-resolution one and it should work just fine.

If you try this, please tell how it worked and share your code!

[Matthias Seemann]

I will post the progress on this issue when I got it working. I hope in a few weeks!