Assess canister_heartbeat as polling mechanism

[jorgenbuilder]

We need to know if heartbeat will work for polling game canisters every minute or couple of minutes. Technical doc.

• Cubic heartbeat example (backend)
• Cubic heartbeat example (frontend)
• Heartbeat source code

[jorgenbuilder]

This test doesn't seem to do anything at all. Perhaps local replica doesn't have the functionality, or perhaps heartbeat doesn't at all do what I think it does.

import Debug "mo:base/Debug";

actor {
    public shared func canister_heartbeat () : async () {
        Debug.print("bumbum");
    };
};

[jorgenbuilder]

This forum post shares some additional details on heartbeat (and a library to help out with crons!) https://forum.dfinity.org/t/ic-cron-lets-schedule-some-tasks-bois/6506/11

Information is quite scarce. Dfinity confirmed that the invocation of the heartbeat happens in a closed source repo.

[jorgenbuilder]

Motoko doesn't support heartbeat yet. There's a chance that it does in time for the hackathon, but this implementation uses our frontends for the heartbeat invocation: https://github.com/jorgenbuilder/heartbeat.