If you need to go fancy with timers, updating timers, postpone events, etc, you can checkout :gen_statem in erlang. It is basically a GenServer with lots of bells and whistles.
derek-zhou
kokolegorille
thoughtarray
Hey all and future search engine visitors (like me). I wanted to mention something I feel was missed here. In case it matters to your program, you can ensure that your initial :tick message is sent after GenServer’s event loop is started by using the handle_continue/2 callback.
@impl true
def init(state) do
{:ok, state, {:continue, :init}}
end
@impl true
def handle_continue(:init, state) do
send(self(), :tick)
{:noreply, state}
end
2