util.sleep is only available inflight

[skorfmann]

I tried this:

use util.sleep in preflight

This happened:

only available inflight

I expected this:

use it preflight

Is there a workaround?

was trying to use util.shell - but can't due to #5417

Anything else?

No response

Wing Version

main branch

Node.js Version

18.7

Platform(s)

MacOS

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[eladb]

Can you share more details about the use case?

[skorfmann]

in this particular case wanted to do testing (generating a batch of ulids in preflight).

What's the reasoning for it being inflight only?

[eladb]

What's the reasoning for it being inflight only?

It's a technical limitation. Preflight is sync while inflight is async. In JavaScript, synchronously sleeping is not really a thing, so sleeping during preflight is a bit tricky to implement (one can implement this with spawnSync() or a busy wait.

[Chriscbr]

If we're running preflight code in a worker thread it could also be possible to sleep using the Atomics API:

const sleep = milliseconds => Atomics.wait(new Int32Array(new SharedArrayBuffer(4)), 0, 0, milliseconds);
sleep(5000);