CppTimer

Generic C++ Timer for Linux

It's a wrapper around the Linux timers. The timer used is timerfd which is a file descriptor which blocks till a certain time has elapsed. This means it puts a thread to sleep till it unblocks which is the general approach for Linux events. There are three ways of using the timer:

1. by overloading the timerEvent() method in the CppTimer class itself (fastest)
2. by registering a callback class called Runnable with an overloaded run() method.
3. by registering a lambda function

Installation

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Usage (overloading the timer event)

The doxygen generated online docs are here: https://berndporr.github.io/cppTimer/

Include CppTimer.h in your program. That's it.

TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(your_project_title cpptimer rt)

Create the Timer class

class MyTimer : public CppTimer {

	void timerEvent() {
		// your timer event code here
	}
};

where you override timerEvent with your function.

Run the Timer class

The timer is programmed in nanoseconds:

	MyTimer myTimer;
	// every 500000ns
	myTimer.startns(500000);

or milliseconds:

	// every 200ms
	myTimer.startms(200);

As soon as start returns the timer fires instantly and then at the specified interval.

Demo program

To run demo.cpp just do cmake ., make and then ./demo.

Callback interface version

Instead of overloading the run() method in the timer class you can overload the run() method in the Runnable class and then register this class with the timer class. Check out demo_callbackinterface which demonstrates this approach.

Callback via lambda function

Here, the callback is a std::function which then calls the suscriber with the help of a lambda function instead of a callback interface. This allows direct registering of a method of the receiving class without an interface. It's also more flexile because some work can be done inside of the lambda function and it's entirely pointer-free!

The recommended approach in modern C++!

Unit tests

Run:

ctest

That's it. Enjoy!