I can't make my script do nothing!
Yes,
the title is grammatical. A few days ago I was discussing the semantics of data
that isn't there. Today I want to talk a little about programs
that do nothing"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />. What
do you do when you want a program to pause briefly, for whatever reason?
Those
of you who like me cut your programming teeth on Commodore PET Basic know the
answer. A for loop will do the trick.
for(x
= 0 ; x < 1000000 ; ++x) {}
Of
course, that has the problem that the time spent paused is shorter on faster machines.
The obvious improvement waits until a given number of milliseconds have passed:
for(var
startTime = new Date(); new Date() - startTime > 1000 ; ) {}
The
problem with both these techniques is that this is busy
waiting. The program may appear to
be paused but it is actually executing as furiously as ever. The processor is
probably pegged to 100% but doing entirely pointless work. In a multithreaded,
multiprocess operating system busy waiting is downright rude -- the processor could
be tending to other tasks like redrawing the screen or background processing.
Really
what you want to do is to ask the operating system to put the process asleep for a
bit and then wake it up later, right? That way the program pauses but the thread
scheduler is free to run something more important. And indeed, there's a Win32 API
that does just that, Sleep.
But
there is no way to call win32 APIs directly from script, so the scriptable "go to
sleep" method needs to either be built in to the language, or (the horror!) in
an ActiveX object. So why the heck do VBScript and JScript not have a "go to
sleep" method built in?
Well,
actually, there were good reasons why we didn't. The principal reason is because I
lied above. You do NOT want to put the process to sleep and wake it up again
later, because while the script is "sleeping",
you
still might want event handlers to run.
The
way events work in Apartment Threaded COM objects such as initialized script
engines (see my earlier entries for a refresher on how the script engine threading
model works) is pretty simple. When the user clicks on a button and raises a button
event, what actually happens is a bunch of messages are deposited in the thread's
message queue. When the message queue is pumped, the messages tell the COM plumbing
to call the event sinks listening to the event sources.
So
what happens when a thread is asleep? No message loop runs on the thread!
How could it? It's asleep.
So you put your script to sleep for ten seconds, a user presses a button, and then
waits at least ten seconds for the message loop to get pumped? That seems kind
of suboptimal. The sleep method needs
to pump a message loop occasionally so that events get handled.
It
gets worse. What if one of those event
sinks causes a script error, which is then reported to the host, and the host decides
to shut down the script engine? Ten seconds later, the script wakes up and keeps running!
Oh, the pain.
To
properly implement a "go to sleep" method you need to know all kinds of details about
the desired message processing, event handling, error handling and
multi-threading semantics of the host application. We were very worried that
we'd add a method to the script engines which, when used in IE, or ASP, or WSH, or
some third-party script host, completely screw up the carefully implemented host.
Hence,
no "go to sleep" method in the languages. If
the host implementor thinks that a "go to sleep" method is necessary, they can implement
one and add it to their object model, as we did for WSH.