[Python-Dev] Drop the new time.wallclock() function? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Mar 14 02:34:05 CET 2012

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that it's better to have only one of these. I also think if we offer it we should always have it -- if none of the implementations are available, I guess you could fall back on returning time.time(), with some suitable offset so people don't think it is always the same. Maybe it could be called realtime()? For a concrete use case, see for example: http://bugs.python.org/issue14222 I just wrote two patches, for the queue and threading modules, using time.monotonic() if available, with a fallback to time.time(). My patches call time.monotonic() to ensure that it doesn't fail with OSError. I suppose that most libraries and programs will have to implement a similar fallback.

It seems horrible to force everyone to copy the same silly block of code. The time module itself should implement this once.

We may merge both functions with a flag to be able to disable the fallback. Example:

 - time.realtime(): best-effort monotonic, with a fallback  - time.realtime(monotonic=True): monotonic, may raise OSError or NotImplementedError

I have no opinions on this or other API details. But please make the function always exist and return something vaguely resembling a monotonic real-time clock. (BTW IMO the docs should state explicitly that it returns a float.)

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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