[Python-Dev] PEP 418 is too divisive and confusing and should be postponed (original) (raw)

Tim Delaney timothy.c.delaney at gmail.com
Sat Apr 7 00:17:15 CEST 2012

On 4 April 2012 10:33, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

try: from os import bestclock as bestclock except ImportError: bestclock = time

My problem here is that "best clock" means different things to different people (as the number of emails shows).

I think exposing specific clocks is also useful (sometimes people may need a steady clock, and early failure is better than clock skew). However, I propose a loosely classified set of clocks built on top of the specific clocks, all of which can fall back to the lowest precision/non-monotonic clock if needed.

  1. The "steadiest" clock on the system. Ideally this would be a steady clock, but may not be.

  2. The "most precise" clock on the system. This would have the finest-grain tick available on the system.

  3. The "highest performance" (or maybe "lowest latency") clock. This would be whichever clock on the system returned its results fastest.

I'm not sure if there are more that would be needed ("most accurate" comes to mind, but feels like it's arbitrarily choosing between steadiest and most precise, so I don't think it's valid).

By choosing relative terms, it caters to people's desire to have the "best" clock, but doesn't set the expectation that the behaviour is guaranteed.

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