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

Matt Joiner anacrolix at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 18:15:52 CET 2012

FWIW the name is quite important, because these kind of timings are quite important so I think it's worth the effort.

- By default, it should fall back to time.time if a better source is  not available, but there should be a flag that can disable this  fallback for users who really need a monotonic/steady time source.

Agreed. As Guido mentioned, some platforms might not be able to access to hardware times, so falling back should be the default, lest unaware users trigger unexpected errors.

- Proposed names for the function:  * monotonic

Doesn't indicate that the timing is also prevented from leaping forward.

 * steadyclock

I think the use of clock might infer CPU time on doc-skimming user. "clock" is overloaded here.

For the flag name, I'm -1 on "monotonic" -- it sounds like a flag to decide whether to use a monotonic time source always or never, while it actually decides between "always" and "sometimes". I think "strict" is nicer than "fallback", but I'm fine with either one.

I agree, "strict" fits in with existing APIs.

I think time.hardware(), and time.steady() are still okay here.

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