The worst issue I had with consts.sh for clock_gettime is how it defined
too many clocks. So I looked into these clocks all day to figure out how
how they overlap in functionality. I discovered counter-intuitive things
such as how CLOCK_MONOTONIC should be CLOCK_UPTIME on MacOS and BSD, and
that CLOCK_BOOTTIME should be CLOCK_MONOTONIC on MacOS / BSD. Windows 10
also has some incredible new APIs, that let us simplify clock_gettime().
- Linux CLOCK_REALTIME -> GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTimePrecise()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTimePrecise()
- Linux CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE -> GetSystemTimeAsFileTime()
- Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE -> QueryUnbiasedInterruptTime()
- Linux CLOCK_BOOTTIME -> QueryInterruptTimePrecise()
Documentation on the clock crew has been added to clock_gettime() in the
docstring and in redbean's documentation too. You can read that to learn
interesting facts about eight essential clocks that survived this purge.
This is original research you will not find on Google, OpenAI, or Claude
I've tested this change by porting *NSYNC to become fully clock agnostic
since it has extensive tests for spotting irregularities in time. I have
also included these tests in the default build so they no longer need to
be run manually. Both CLOCK_REALTIME and CLOCK_MONOTONIC are good across
the entire amd64 and arm64 test fleets.
This is one of the few POSIX APIs that was missing. It lets you choose a
monotonic clock for your condition variables. This might improve perf on
some platforms. It might also grant more flexibility with NTP configs. I
know Qt is one project that believes it needs this. To introduce this, I
needed to change some the *NSYNC APIs, to support passing a clock param.
There's also new benchmarks, demonstrating Cosmopolitan's supremacy over
many libc implementations when it comes to mutex performance. Cygwin has
an alarmingly bad pthread_mutex_t implementation. It is so bad that they
would have been significantly better off if they'd used naive spinlocks.
