Busy-waiting loop
A busy-waiting loop repeatedly checks a condition while actively consuming processor resources instead of blocking or relinquishing control.
100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
A busy loop is a repeated polling loop that continuously checks a condition instead of blocking until the condition may have changed.
- How it is used
- Identifies wasted CPU cycles in donation-goal listeners and a channel-merging loop.
- How deep it goes
- Traces two concrete loop failures and contrasts polling with condition-variable waiting and nil-channel disabling.
- Examples
- Uses donation-goal listeners polling a balance and a two-channel merge that keeps selecting a closed input.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug busy loops by replacing repeated balance checks with sync.Cond waiting or disabling closed select inputs with nil.
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Software Design for Python Programmers
Busy waiting is repeatedly consuming execution time while waiting instead of relinquishing control to other threads.
- How it is used
- Simulates work that occupies a thread for a measured duration while demonstrating access to a shared resource.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the scheduling cost and implements a timed loop, but does not develop a general waiting strategy.
- Examples
- Uses technician meter-setting and logger read-and-log durations as concrete busy-waiting examples.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch using a timed Python loop that continues until elapsed time reaches the requested duration.
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Rust in Action: Systems programming concepts and techniques
A spin loop repeatedly checks a condition while actively consuming CPU time instead of blocking execution.
- How it is used
- Uses active waiting for short pauses when sleep timing is insufficiently precise or timing sensitivity matters.
- How deep it goes
- Implements elapsed-time polling, thread yielding, joining, a broken borrowing variant, and scalability limits across CPU cores.
- Examples
- Demonstrates a 20-millisecond Rust wait, compares it with thread::sleep, and reproduces timing data across up to 1,000 threads.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch in Rust, benchmark it against sleep, and diagnose ownership errors when joining stored thread handlers.
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Related concepts
- sleepcontrasts with · A sleep operation suspends execution of a thread, goroutine, or coroutine for a specified duration, blocking or yielding according to its execution model.
- sync.Condaddressed by · sync.Cond is a Go standard-library condition-variable type that coordinates waiting and signaling among goroutines using a sync.Locker.
- missing valueaddressed by · A missing value is a marker or condition indicating that an expected data value or reference is absent, unavailable, unknown, or inapplicable.
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