time.h design issues

D. J. Bernstein djb at cr.yp.to
Mon Aug 30 23:02:59 UTC 1999


Markus Kuhn writes:
> no feasible implementation I can think of that would really guarantee
> a long-term monotonicity requirement as Dan seems to want.

Long-term monotonicity is the natural state of affairs. Clocks increase
over time, see? It would be trivial for an OS kernel to guarantee this,
even through reboots, given the battery-powered clocks already available
in almost all computers.

> I hope that my API proposal is good enough to allow a portable
> conforming implementation of Ada95's section D.8 on top of it.

But your API obviously flunks this test.

You keep talking about safety-critical real-time applications. I have
news for you: safety-critical real-time applications need tick counters
that _=08w_=08o_=08r_=08k. Your TIME_MONOTONIC is allowed to fail at any mo=
ment.

---Dan



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