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

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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()?
>
> For a concrete use case, see for example:
> http://bugs.python.org/issue14222
>
> I just wrote two patches, for the queue and threading modules, using
> time.monotonic() if available, with a fallback to time.time(). My
> patches call time.monotonic() to ensure that it doesn't fail with
> OSError.
>
> I suppose that most libraries and programs will have to implement a
> similar fallback.

It seems horrible to force everyone to copy the same silly block of
code. The time module itself should implement this once.

> We may merge both functions with a flag to be able to disable the
> fallback. Example:
>
>  - time.realtime(): best-effort monotonic, with a fallback
>  - time.realtime(monotonic=True): monotonic, may raise OSError or
> NotImplementedError

I have no opinions on this or other API details. But please make the
function always exist and return something vaguely resembling a
monotonic real-time clock. (BTW IMO the docs should state explicitly
that it returns a float.)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)