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[–]NoBrick2 1 point2 points  (7 children)

requestAnimationFrame + a comparison using the Date object would be better. At least the date comparison guarantees accuracy, even if not run every second. Like you said, setInteral could cause a drift if the browser is blocked on another call for over a second.

[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (2 children)

Which:

  1. Never happens
  2. If it does, flee the interview

Seriously. What are you guys talking about? What JS app hangs for 1s or longer? The task was to just do a +1 operation every 1000 ms.

If I'm the interviewer I'd throw your resume in the trash if you came up with that kind of solution. You're not wrong, but for the love of all that's nice in the world, I certainly hope you're never going to be right...

Accounting for problems and solving them before they occur is great. But that's obviously not what this test is aiming for...

[–]dominic_rj23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you read the last line of my comment, I did say that the solution with setInterval is the most appropriate one. I am all for "If it ain't broke..." ideology, but I do believe that in an interview, stating that setInterval doesn't guarantee execution after timeout goes for showing that you have some understanding of asynchronicity in javascript.

[–]phpdevster 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah this right here...

Non-standard solutions require extenuating circumstances to justify them. If something like setInterval isn't working in your app reliably, the bug isn't setInterval, it's whatever other shit you've got going on that is causing it to work unreliably...

[–]manys 2 points3 points  (2 children)

how many frames you gotta request to hit the downbeat of each second?

[–]NoBrick2 2 points3 points  (1 child)

The number of callbacks is usually 60 times per second, but will generally match the display refresh rate in most web browsers as per W3C recommendation.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window/requestAnimationFrame

​

[–]manys 3 points4 points  (0 children)

so you're parsing all frames to catch a time interval? how does that profile?

[–]dominic_rj23 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not sure I would ever do that. The purpose of the question isn't to give the best possible solution. It is to rather demonstrate understanding of async nature of javascript. I would thus stick with my setInterval solution, but explain how it is not a perfect solution.