Avoiding old data in Rust channel

(2019-06-02)

Sometimes a consumer takes a long time to finish a task, and producers keep sending data. This situation can cause a memory leak. Keep processing out-dated data makes no sense in some applications.

So I write a program to keep receiving data within 10ms time frame, and discard old data.

use std::sync::mpsc::channel;
use std::{thread, time};

fn main() {
    let (tx, rx) = channel();
    thread::spawn(move || {
        let tx_delay_time = time::Duration::from_millis(100);
        loop {
            for i in 1..1000 {
                tx.send(i).expect("Cannot send");
                if i % 10 == 0 {
                    thread::sleep(tx_delay_time);
                }
            }
        }
    });

    let timeout = time::Duration::from_millis(10);
    loop {
        println!("LOOP");
        let mut i = None;
        loop {
            match rx.recv_timeout(timeout) {
                Ok(j) => {
                    i = Some(j);
                },
                Err(_) => {
                    if i.is_some() {
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        // long task ...
        println!("{:?}", i);
        i = None;
    }
}

`

I feel that the program look too complicated. Perhaps I shouldn't a channel at all in this case. 🤣