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

Christian Tismer tismer at stackless.com
Wed Mar 14 02:06:35 CET 2012

On 3/13/12 5:45 PM, Kristján Valur Jónsson wrote:

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()?

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Btw., have you considered virtual machines? I happen to run windows in Parallels or Virtualbox quite often. There the "wall clock" stuff notoriously does not work.

It would be good (but difficult?) if the supposed-to-be-accurate clock could test itself, if it works at all, and replace itself with a fallback.

In my case, this causes quite a few PyPy tests to fail ;-)

ciao -- Chris

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