Re: microseconds update

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

On 03.11.2010 04:39, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi everyone,
>
> I wrote an email yesterday detailing my goals to reduce GLib to having a
> single type for time.  The work just landed on master.
>
> Of course, there were complications.
>
> Status report:
>
>  - GTimeSpec is gone
>
>  - g_get_monotonic_time() returns int64 time
>
>  - new function g_get_real_time() returns wall clock int64 time
>
>  - it's not really possible to deprecate GTimeVal at the moment due to
>    its appearance in a large number of APIs and (most annoyingly) on the
>    vtable of the thread implementation.
>
>    It's on the glib4 kill list and I added a docs note about that.
>
>  - GTimer is also not deprecated because it has a lot of users and it's
>    not immediately clear that we should disrupt them.  GTimer is
>    switched to monotonic time, though, and is using int64 internally.
>
>    I had one uneasy feeling while looking at removing GTimer.
>    g_timer_elapsed() rather conveniently returns a double -- which is
>    great for whacking directly into a printf statement.  Many people use
>    it this way.  Of course, it's quite easy to do the math yourself, but
>    not quite as nice.
>
>
> So far I'm using int64 everywhere, but I wonder if we should introduce
> some extra meaningless typedefs to improve the self-documentation of
> function signatures and user code.  We already have GTimeSpan to
> represent the distance between two times, but it's clear that we should
> not use that for absolute representation of either monotonic or
> wallclock time.  Perhaps we should also have two new types to represent
> absolute values of wall-clock time and monotonic time.
>
> I'm not crazy about the caps used on GTimeSpan (being that it's an
> integer type).
>   

We have a few macros in GStreamer
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/html/GstClock.html
and those are certainly improving the readability of the code.

Stefan

> I guess my preferred names for the new types would be "gmonotime" and
> "grealtime".  We could also go the route of having a single new type,
> gtime.
>
> Or nothing at all.
>
>
> Cheers
>
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