[Python-Dev] PEP 410 (Decimal timestamp): the implementation is ready for a review

[Victor Stinner]

2012/2/15 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:
> I just came to this thread. Having read the good arguments on both
> sides, I keep wondering why anybody would care about nanosecond
> precision in timestamps.

Python 3.3 exposes C functions that return timespec structure. This
structure contains a timestamp with a resolution of 1 nanosecond,
whereas the timeval structure has only a resolution of 1 microsecond.
Examples of C functions -> Python functions:

 - timeval: gettimeofday() -> time.time()
 - timespec: clock_gettime() -> time.clock_gettime()
 - timespec: stat() -> os.stat()
 - etc.

If we keep float, Python would have has worse precision than C just
because it uses an inappropriate type (C uses two integers in
timeval).

Linux supports nanosecond timestamps since Linux 2.6, Windows supports
100 ns resolution since Windows 2000 or maybe before. It doesn't mean
that Windows system clock is accurate: in practical, it's hard to get
something better than 1 ms :-) But you may use
QueryPerformanceCounter() is you need a bettre precision, it is used
by time.clock() for example.

> For measuring e.g. file access times, there
> is no way that the actual time is know with anything like that
> precision (even if it is *recorded* as a number of milliseconds --
> that's a different issue).

If you need a real world example, here is an extract of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4:

"Improved timestamps
    As computers become faster in general and as Linux becomes used
more for mission-critical applications, the granularity of
second-based timestamps becomes insufficient. To solve this, ext4
provides timestamps measured in nanoseconds. (...)"

So nanosecond resolution is needed to check if a file is newer than
another. Such test is common in build programs like make or scons.

Filesystems resolution:
 - ext4: 1 ns
 - btrfs: 1 ns
 - NTFS: 100 ns
 - FAT32: 2 sec (yeah!)

Victor