Generate high resolution timestamp · Issue #42 · bahmanm/bmakelib
github.com
I find myself frequently needing to generate a µs precision timestamp. some-target : @echo Microseconds: $(call now,micros) @echo Milliseconds: $(call now,millis) @echo Seconds: $(call now,secs) @e...

bmakelib is a minimalist standard library for writing Makefiles.

What do you think about being able to easily generate µsecond precision timestamps in a Makefile?

Please take a second to look at https://github.com/bahmanm/bmakelib/issues/42 & share your thoughts/emojis 🙏

  • bahmanmOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Good point 👍

    Likewise, I never thought I’d need any timestamp w/ a finer resolution than millis, until my tests started failing:

    There is a feature in bmakelib (called !!logged) which logs the stdout/err of a given target to disk. When I was writing tests for it, I noticed that occasionally my tests fail where they shouldn’t have (for context, the tests used to create files w/ millis resolution and then check the contents.) Turned out the my tests were fast enough that more than 1 of them would run and finish in a single millisecond causing the “expected” files to be overwritten.

    That’s how I got to thinking that it may be something which can be added to bmakelib.

    The benefit is that you don’t need to do much and you ensure the timestamp has a high resolution. That will make it harder to produce difficult-to-debug bugs 😅

    The downsides are 1) cognitive load (yet another thing to know about) 2) filenames/variables/… will have 3 extra characters which stand for µ fraction.

    Does that make sense?