Die Resonanzkaska.de
Thoughts about Real Time
2025-01-13
The term real time may be extremely misleading, when typing. It indicates that both the type strokes, the receiving of the type strokes, the orderly procession and display would all be invoked without no arbitrary delay whatsoever. This is not the case on a normal system. As any call to `sleep(1)` even if only for a microsecond breaks that promise. Why would it break that promise 'though? Because simply the aforementioned sleep-call is defined as to wait for the given amount of time OR more. So, even when we do a sleep for 1 microsecond, it could be returning multiple seconds later. That is the definition of such a `sleep()` call. The implicit promise we get with "real time" means, every and any action occurs in direct succession to one another without extraneous delays - so if you pump a water pump and the water takes multiple seconds to take all the way through the pump to the pump's outlet, that still would be real time as the water would be doing it's thing in direct relation to the initial event start.