Batch updates

While the performance of tpipeline itself has been optimized quite a
while for now, it is still possible for a bottleneck to appear, if the
downstream consumer is too slow.

The problem does not really show up when using tmux, but when using
other external integrations (e.g. kitty), it is possible that the
external statusline update can become a bottleneck. Kitty's custom
tabbar integration being written in Python does not really help with
this.

It should be noted that this has never caused any delays in vim itself,
given that this bottleneck only happens in the part, that is already
running completely asynchronous from vim itself.

But it could cause some hilarious problems, where the external
statusline starts to lag behind noticably behind the live statusline in
vim.

To fix this we batch updates by depleting stdin completely before
dispatching the external statusline update.
Unfortunately there is not really a very good way to test if stdin
contains more data just with shell code.

We opt to use a hack with "read -t", which will fail immediately if
stdin is empty:

-t timeout  time out and return failure if a complete line of
	input is not read within TIMEOUT seconds.  The value of the
	TMOUT variable is the default timeout.  TIMEOUT may be a
	fractional number.  If TIMEOUT is 0, read returns
	immediately, without trying to read any data, returning
	success only if input is available on the specified
	file descriptor.  The exit status is greater than 128
	if the timeout is exceeded

This is a complete hack, because "-t" is not really portable across sh
implementations, e.g. the slightly widely used dash does not support it.

We are very lucky with this specific codepath though, because "sh does
not support -t" and "there is no more stdin data ready" have the same
exit code, thus sh implementations not supporting this flag will
automatically fallback to the old unbatched update path, i.e. they will
never enter the inner while loop.

If this however still ever causes problems in the future, we could think
about using bash instead of sh. Both are basically preinstalled
everywhere anyway.

With this we can also lower the catchup time in the performance test, as
the lagging behind is completely fixed now.

In any case this also adds a completely new unit test that tests the
lag-behind after updating the statusline every millisecond for 3
seconds.

Fixes #64

Author: vimpostor

autoload/tpipeline.vim

@@ -174,7 +174,8 @@ func tpipeline#fork_job()
 		let s:restore_right = systemlist("sh -c 'echo \"\"; tmux display-message -p \"#{status-right}\"'")[-1]
 	endif
 	let script = printf("export IFS='$\\n'; while read -r l; do%s", g:tpipeline_split ? " read -r r;" : "")
-	let script .= printf(" echo \"$l\" > '%s'%s", s:tpipeline_filepath, g:tpipeline_split ? printf("; echo \"$r\" > '%s'", s:tpipeline_right_filepath) : "")
+	let script .= printf(" while read -t 0 _; do read -r l%s; done", g:tpipeline_split ? "; read -r r" : "") " batch updates
+	let script .= printf("; echo \"$l\" > '%s'%s", s:tpipeline_filepath, g:tpipeline_split ? printf("; echo \"$r\" > '%s'", s:tpipeline_right_filepath) : "")
 	if g:tpipeline_usepane
 		" end early if file was truncated so as not to overwrite any titles of panes we may switch to
 		let script .= "; if [ -z \"$l\" ]; then continue; fi"

tests/test_general.vim

@@ -26,6 +26,15 @@ func Read_socket()
 	endif
 endfunc
 
+func Scroll()
+	if line(".") - 1
+		norm k
+	else
+		norm G
+	endif
+	call tpipeline#update()
+endfunc
+
 func Test_loaded()
 	call assert_equal(1, g:loaded_tpipeline)
 endfunc
@@ -143,21 +152,13 @@ func Test_performance()
 	exec printf("profile start %s", log_file)
 	profile func tpipeline#update
 	" simulate someone scrolling at 120FPS
-	func Scroll()
-		if line(".") - 1
-			norm k
-		else
-			norm G
-		endif
-		call tpipeline#update()
-	endfunc
 	let timer = timer_start(float2nr(individual_threshold * 1000), {-> Scroll()}, {'repeat': -1})
 	exec "sleep " . test_duration
 
 	profile stop
 	call timer_stop(timer)
 	" wait for tmux to catch up
-	sleep 2
+	sleep 200m
 
 	let log = readfile(log_file, '', 5)
 	call assert_equal('FUNCTION  tpipeline#update()', log[0])
@@ -220,3 +221,21 @@ func Test_minwid_padded()
 	call assert_match("a$", s:left)
 	call assert_true(empty(s:right))
 endfunc
+
+func Test_lag_behind()
+	" statusline should not lag behind even after rapid fire updates
+	let g:tpipeline_statusline = "%!tpipeline#stl#line()"
+	let test_duration = "3"
+	norm 99o
+	" update literally every single ms
+	let timer = timer_start(1, {-> Scroll()}, {'repeat': -1})
+	exec "sleep " . test_duration
+	call timer_stop(timer)
+
+	" now set a new statusline, the new value should appear immediately without any lag
+	let g:tpipeline_statusline = "RAPIDFIRE"
+	call Read_socket()
+	call assert_equal('RAPIDFIRE', Strip_hl(s:left))
+
+	bd!
+endfunc