Timer Wrapper

[beckydvn]

I'm wondering where the trace-timing wrapper should go file-wise. It's not pddl-centric in any way, it pretty much just takes a function and ensures it runs within the time given by the constant. Maybe in a separate file under the generate folder? Also, are there other wrappers we're going to need to eventually make?

[haz]

I think this one might be general enough. Maybe in macq/utils?

Note that this is kind of a special one -- we want to cap it across multiple function calls in order to capture "time since we've found something". There may be 2 attempts or 2000. So I can imagine usage kind of like...

countdown = macq.utils.timer.Countdown(600) # 10min
traces = []
while len(traces) < num_traces:
    trace = compute_trace(...)
    if trace:
        traces.append(trace)
        countdown.reset()
    elif countdown.expired():
        # throw an error and explain that things timed out & how to change the constant

[beckydvn]

Yep! Here's the wrapper:
https://github.com/QuMuLab/macq/blob/1fdad92f21d476f9fae09565b44e895548b2d5bd/macq/generate/pddl/generator.py#L17
And here is where it is used:
https://github.com/QuMuLab/macq/blob/1fdad92f21d476f9fae09565b44e895548b2d5bd/macq/generate/pddl/vanilla_sampling.py#L53

[haz]

Nice! So you went the decorator route. How UNIX-specific is that subprocess style?

Let's keep what you have, and...

1. rename to be more general (used in extraction and stuff too)
2. move to a top-level utils module
3. add a parameter for the decorator so we can pass in the # of seconds at the place of decoration

[beckydvn]

Will do! And according to the docs, it runs on both UNIX and Windows:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html

[beckydvn]

Just wondering, why add a parameter for the decorator if the user can change the MAX_TIME constant directly?

[haz]

Because we may want to define different constants and wrap multiple things with them. So the decorator uses the appropriate constant as its argument.