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

Kristján Valur Jónsson kristjan at ccpgames.com
Wed Mar 14 01:45:27 CET 2012

The reason I originally suggested "wallclock" was because that term is often used to distinguish time measurements (delta) that show real world time from those showing CPU or Kernel time. "number.crunch() took 2 seconds wallclock time but only 1 second CPU!". The original problem was that time.clock() was "wallclock" on some platforms but "cpu" on others, IIRC. But monotonic is probably even better. I agree removing one or the other, probably wallclock. K

-----Original Message----- From: python-dev-bounces+kristjan=ccpgames.com at python.org [mailto:python-dev-bounces+kristjan=ccpgames.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Guido van Rossum Sent: 13. mars 2012 17:27 To: Victor Stinner Cc: Python Dev Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Drop the new time.wallclock() function?

I think wallclock() is an awkward name; in other contexts I've seen "wall clock time" used to mean the time that a clock on the wall would show, i.e. local time. This matches definition #1 of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wall-time.html (while yours matches #2 :-).

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()?

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list