[Python-ideas] Why not picoseconds?

[Stefan Behnel]

Antoine Pitrou schrieb am 16.10.2017 um 10:20:
> On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 22:00:10 -0700
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> 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 ;-)

Then we shouldn't implement the new nanosecond API at all, in order to keep
pressure on the hardware developers.

Stefan :o)