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[Python-ideas] Why not picoseconds?

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Oct 16 04:20:23 EDT 2017 
On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 22:00:10 -0700
Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hopefully by the time we decide it's worth worrying about picoseconds in
> > "regular" code, compiler support for decimal128 will be sufficiently
> > ubiquitous that we'll be able to rely on that as our 3rd generation time
> > representation (where the first gen is seconds as a 64 bit binary float and
> > the second gen is nanoseconds as a 64 bit integer).
> >  
> 
> I hope we'll never see time_ns() and friends as the second generation --
> it's a hack that hopefully we can retire in those glorious days of hardware
> decimal128 support.

Given the implementation costs, hardware decimal128 will only become
mainstream if there's a strong incentive for it, which I'm not sure
exists or will ever exist ;-)

Regards

Antoine.
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