Timers and Delays

Garyon includes a few lightweight time-based primitives under the Garyon.Mechanisms namespace. They are designed to be small building blocks for polling loops, throttling, debouncing, and "wait until" workflows.

Note

These types generally do not schedule callbacks or raise events. They are meant to be queried (and updated) on demand.

ActionTimer (throttle gating)

ActionTimer is a minimal "am I allowed to run now?" gate:

• It tracks the last registered execution time.
• Request(register: true) returns true when at least MinOffset has elapsed since the last registration, and updates the registration time.

using Garyon.Mechanisms;

var timer = new ActionTimer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));

while (true)
{
    if (timer.Request(register: true))
    {
        // Runs at most once per second.
        Console.WriteLine("Tick");
    }
}

Tip

The very first Request(true) will typically succeed because the initial LastExecutionTime has not been set yet.

LazyTimer (lazy timeouts)

LazyTimer represents a timestamp (NextSignal) and exposes a lazily evaluated boolean:

• SignalRaised becomes true when NextSignal <= DateTime.Now.
• You control when the timer is "checked" by reading SignalRaised.
• You control when the next timeout happens by setting NextSignal (or calling Reset(...)).

A common pattern is "run when raised, then reschedule":

using Garyon.Mechanisms;

var timer = LazyTimer.InitializeRaised();

if (timer.ResetIfRaisedSignal(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5)))
{
    // Do periodic work every ~5 minutes, on demand.
}

Delayer (awaiting an extendable unblock time)

Delayer tracks a "next unblock" time and lets you await it via WaitUnblock(...).

What makes it different from a plain Task.Delay(...) is that you can extend the unblock time while a wait is already in progress:

using Garyon.Mechanisms;

var delayer = new Delayer();

// Somewhere: keep pushing the unblock further into the future.
delayer.SetFutureUnblock(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));

// Somewhere else: await until the (possibly-extended) unblock time is reached.
await delayer.WaitUnblock(CancellationToken.None);

Note

CancelUnblock() resets the internal unblock time, but does not cancel an already returned WaitUnblock(...) task; use a CancellationToken if you need to stop awaiting early.