►The Racket Reference
▼10 Concurrency and Parallelism
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10.7 Engines

 (require racket/engine)
The bindings documented in this section are provided by the racket/engine library, not racket/base or racket.

An engine is an abstraction that models processes that can be preempted by a timer or other external trigger. They are inspired by the work of Haynes and Friedman [Haynes84].

procedure

(engine proc) → engine?

  proc : ((any/c . -> . void?) . -> . any/c)
Returns an engine object to encapsulate a thread that runs only when allowed. The proc procedure should accept one argument, and proc is run in the engine thread when engine-run is called. If engine-run returns due to a timeout, then the engine thread is suspended until a future call to engine-run. Thus, proc only executes during the dynamic extent of a engine-run call.

The argument to proc is a procedure that takes a boolean, and it can be used to disable suspends (in case proc has critical regions where it should not be suspended). A true value passed to the procedure enables suspends, and #f disables suspends. Initially, suspends are allowed.

procedure

(engine? v) → any

  v : any/c
Returns #t if v is an engine produced by engine, #f otherwise.

procedure

(engine-run until engine) → boolean?

  until : (or/c evt? real?)
  engine : engine?
Allows the thread associated with engine to execute for up as long as until milliseconds (of until is a real number) or until is ready (if until is an event). If engine’s procedure disables suspends, then the engine can run arbitrarily long until it re-enables suspends.

The engine-run procedure returns #t if engine’s procedure completes (or if it completed earlier), and the result is available via engine-result. The engine-run procedure returns #f if engine’s procedure does not complete before it is suspended after timeout-secs. If engine’s procedure raises an exception, then it is re-raised by engine-run.

procedure

(engine-result engine) → any

  engine : engine
Returns the result for engine if it has completed with a value (as opposed to an exception), #f otherwise.

procedure

(engine-kill engine) → void?

  engine : engine?
Forcibly terminates the thread associated with engine if it is still running, leaving the engine result unchanged.

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