On Mon May 19 10:04:28 EDT 2014, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: > > 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.
i think my original question still stands. what is the purpose of timing, what is the desired accuracy and precision, and is a relative or absolute time wanted? a relative time (say a time adjusted with timesync, including leap seconds, etc) is not what you want if you want relative timing. something like the timestamp counter makes a lot more sense. i took a quick look at the runtime·nanotime, and it looks like it's being used for gettimeofday, which shouldn't be super performance sensitive. - erik
