Is it possible to probe event loop to see if anything is running?

[jprichardson]

In Node.js:

setTimeout(function () {
  console.log(process._getActiveHandles().length)
}, 5000)

Would output 1 as the setTimeout is still on the event loop. However, in the renderer process, this returns 0. Is there a way to tap into the event loop (presumably v8) and check if anything is pending?

[mattdesl]

If I understand this correctly, does it mean CLI tools like electron-spawn could use this to auto-quit?

If so 👍 this feature would be amazing.

[zcbenz]

Electron itself uses an async handle to implement Node.js integration so that's why process._getActiveHandles() is ways >=1 handle.

But even if we avoid creating active handles in Node.js, the Chromium itself still maintains a quite complex message loop, which means even if there is nothing active in Node.js we might still have lots of things running in Chromium.

[zcbenz]

I'm closing this as won't fix, because even though we can check whether there is things running in Node, we can not do it for Chromium's message loops. Many tasks of Chromium are designed to run forever, so the state of message loop can only be always running.