Re: Any chance gettimeofday() or other millis- or even nanos-precision time function stays in the default Gawk distribution?

[Denis Shirokov]

gettimeofday() is extremely useful in awk programming. undeprecate? just
try programming in gawk and you will change your mind. if it's will be gone
then gawk is ripped for me. just try your own programming language and you
will see that deprecating is destructive

чт, 12 янв. 2023 г. в 20:39, <arnold@skeeve.com>:

> Hi.
>
> Andy and I have consulted a bit. I think I will just undeprecate
> the time extension.
>
> Good luck with your project!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>
> Volodymyr Gubarkov <xonixx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Makesure (https://github.com/xonixx/makesure) is a task/command runner
> that
> > I’m developing. It’s sort of similar to the well-known make tool, but
> > without most of its idiosyncrasies (and with a couple of unique
> features!).
> >
> > It may sound surprising, but I wrote it in AWK.
> >
> > One of the features of this tool is the ability to show timing for
> executed
> > goals: https://github.com/xonixx/makesure#options
> >
> > Initially this was done via system() call to the built-in date command.
> >
> > But this is slow and on macOS (and, probably *BSD) doesn't provide
> > ms-precision: https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/issues/51
> >
> > So I found a solution to rely on gettimeofday() function if Gawk is in
> use:
> > https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/issues/57
> >
> > Overall it appears, there are very few options to get ms-precision
> timings
> > via standard *nix utilities, and gawks's gettimeofday() is (was) one of
> > them:
> >
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16548528/command-to-get-time-in-milliseconds
> >
> >
> > (I beg pardon for a long introduction that looks like advertising)
> >
> > So version GAWK 5.2.1 now shows "gawk: warning: The time extension is
> > obsolete. Use the timex extension from gawkextlib instead."
> >
> > Fair enough. I totally get why the decision to deprecate this in favour
> of
> > gawkextlib is made (
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2019-10/msg00038.html).
> >
> >
> > Obviously, for my tool this excludes the possibility to rely on this
> > function, since the main point of using AWK for it is portability.
> >
> > From the other side, maybe it still does make sense to add gettimeofday()
> > as a built-in function, the same way as Gawk has a set of Gawk-specific
> > functions, like the latest mkbool()?
> >
> > Looking at the source code it doesn’t look like the implementation is
> > terribly complex to support, but I can be wrong.
> >
> > From the other side, given the lack of consistent ms/ns-precision timing
> > facility in standard *nix utilities, the function is really handy for
> > precise time-measurement in your AWK code and not only.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Volodymyr
>
>