On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 22:00:10 -0700
Guido van Rossum
On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Nick Coghlan
wrote: Hopefully by the time we decide it's worth worrying about picoseconds in "regular" code, compiler support for decimal128 will be sufficiently ubiquitous that we'll be able to rely on that as our 3rd generation time representation (where the first gen is seconds as a 64 bit binary float and the second gen is nanoseconds as a 64 bit integer).
I hope we'll never see time_ns() and friends as the second generation -- it's a hack that hopefully we can retire in those glorious days of hardware decimal128 support.
Given the implementation costs, hardware decimal128 will only become mainstream if there's a strong incentive for it, which I'm not sure exists or will ever exist ;-) Regards Antoine.