[fpc-pascal] The unfortunate deprecation of GetTickCount

R0b0t1 r030t1 at gmail.com
Wed Apr 11 19:33:19 CEST 2018


On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 12:11 PM, Tomas Hajny <XHajT03 at hajny.biz> wrote:
> On Wed, April 11, 2018 18:44, R0b0t1 wrote:
>
>  .
>  .
>> This is related to something I meant to propose a while
>> ago related to a cross platform timing and alarm API.
>> I do not think GetTickCount should ever be used;
>> instead, QueryPerformanceCounter makes more sense. It is
>> higher resolution and still portable. The Linux function
>> `clock_gettime` called with `CLOCK_REALTIME_HR` is more
>> or less a direct equivalent.
>
> No, it isn't portable (neither is GetTickCount, BTW) - there are many more
> targets supported by FPC than MS Windows and Linuxm
>

My apologies, I meant portable between Windows versions. Various high
resolution timing facilities on Windows that are not
QueryPerformanceCounter give wildly varying results based on many
factors, usually hardware.

`clock_gettime` is supported by Linux and FreeBSD, which now includes
recent macOS versions. If it is not supported, `gettimeofday` can be
used instead at a lower resolution. There are also timing facilities
based on events that are fairly uniform in interface construction.
Keep in mind that newer timing functions tend to have a noticeable
decrease in resource usage compared to newer ones. The event based
timers are very nice because constant switches into libc are not
necessary.

Cheers,
     R0b0t1

> Tomas
>
>
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