> i indirectly heard "go needs it", but that is not really a reason > i can understand technically. why must it be a system call?
Actually, Go raised an important alert, quite indirectly: when using high resolution timers, the issue of opening a device, reading it and converting the input value to a binary value can and in this case is very expensive. Curiously, the actual symptom - I cannot remember how it came about - was that using the timer leaked file descriptors, or, more likely, gave the impression of leaking file descriptors. But the reality is that nanosecond accuracy cannot be achieved from reading a device by conventional means. ++L
