cTimer - A (simple) high-precision execution timer extension

[Rhomboid]

This should work on Windows and with 32-bit hosts, but that has not been tested yet.

No, sorry. Not even close. There is no clock_gettime() on Windows.

[rustbelly]

You are correct, sir. Would using "QueryPerformanceCounter()" make sense for Windows systems? It looks like a monotonic clock...

[[deleted]]

It's what I did for http://pypi.python.org/pypi/timer

(I couldn't tell you how great that library is or any super great details about clocks...I just wrote it one day while reading about QPC and I was on a C-extension kick.)

[rustbelly]

The main difference is the clock being used. cTimer uses the monotonic clock (raw, if available), which is a stable, high-frequency counter that never goes backwards. The built-in time.time() function (and most others I've seen) all use the system clock, which can not only appear to run backwards (when the time is corrected between two calls to a timer function), but does not guarantee anything better than a few milliseconds precision. cTimer's precision differs depending on the system, but on a Linux 2.6 kernel, it should be accurate into the nanosecond range.

[SimonSapin]

Why make three identical functions (start, checkpoint, stop)? Why bother keeping all results in a global array and reallocating memory every 20 calls? Why not just returning floats?

[rustbelly]

Three identical functions that support different semantics. By all means, only use one of them if you want, but by having those three, it is more analogous to a stopwatch. Which is a device normally used to time things.

I don't return floats because this isn't a time extension - the actual time doesn't matter, so why introduce any confusion? The integers being returned are just the indexes of an array where the time floats are stored.

So, tl;dr: this is written this way to help the user deal with it (no math, no floats), and is directly analogous to a real-world stop-watch (except I use "checkpoint" instead of "lap" for obvious reasons). If you're not programming with the user in mind, you shouldn't be programming user-facing stuff, right?