cs.clockutils 20150116.2

PEP 418 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0418/) generated much discussion.

Most particpants wanted a call to get a high resolution monotonic clock, which many platforms offer, and much of the discussion surrounded what guarrentees Python should offer for the clock it returned.

I was of the opinion that:

• the many different clocks available have varying features and that the user should be able to inspect them when handed a clock

• the proposed time.monotonic() et al should be offered as default policies for convenience

• however, the proposed time.monotonic() call and friends represented policy; the user calling it is handed an arbitrary clock with some guarrentees; the user has no facility to implement policy themselves. Therefore I proposed two calls: get_clock() and get_clocks() for requesting or enumerating clocks with desired features from those available on the platform.

This cs.clockutils package implements get_clock() and get_clocks() and provides example implementations of the “policy” calls such as monotonic().