[Python-Dev] release candidate rules and timeit API question

[Guido van Rossum]

> [Brett]
> > ...
> > My timeit API question has to do with timeit.default_timer .  The docs
> > don't mention it but I think it might be nice to expose it.  The
> > specific I would like to have it available for guaranteed use is that
> > both 'threading' and Queue have code that sleep on an ever-increasing
> > interval.  They both use time.time for their time measurements which
> > is fine on UNIX but sucks on Windows when you consider the max time
> > both chunks of code wait is .05 secs which is below the accuracy
> > threshold for Windows (according to Tim's intro in the Cookbook;
> > thank god for books when tech goes kapoot).  I would like to edit the
> > code so that it uses what timeit.default_timer is set to.  Anyone
> > (especially Guido since he is timeit's original author) have a
> > problem with documenting timeit.default_timer?

[Tim]
> The sleep loop in threading.py is fine as-is:  time.time != time.sleep, and
> there's no problem on Windows sleeping for small bits of time.  The coarse
> granularity of time.time() on Windows only comes into play if the total
> timeout specified is < about 0.055 seconds, but that's a very small total
> timeout value (more typical is a total timeout of a full second or more).
> Queue uses the same polling loop code, and it's also fine there.  It's not
> so fine that this delicate code is duplicated, so I'd rather see an internal
> refactoring to use a common backoff-polling class.

Agreed, and I'd rather not expose this from the timeit module (which
would be a rather strange place to import this timer from).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)