[vlc-devel] [PATCH 04/15] vlc_common: add helper function for explicit nanosecond to/from mtime_t conversion

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le lauantaina 16. kesäkuuta 2018, 11.32.50 EEST Steve Lhomme a écrit :
> On 2018-06-16 10:23 AM, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> > Le lauantaina 16. kesäkuuta 2018, 10.34.18 EEST Steve Lhomme a écrit :
> >> I used milli instead of ms so it's not confused with msftime_t. And so
> >> micro and nano seems like logical siblings.
> > 
> > Then keep mtime and screw this series.
> 
> I find mtime misleading. Especially because it assumes a certain value
> and in many parts of the code 1000 or 1000000 is used instead of proper
> conversion because what could possibly go wrong ?

Well, these things regularly go wrong:
- failing to convert, typically the caching values between ms and µs,
- failing to expand before computation, typically from 32-bits to 64-bits.

mtime_t is not a particularly good name, but it's anyway assumed same as 
int64_t all over the place, so the name does not matter than much.

> With a tick (or something else) you know you have to take care of a
> conversion in the proper time format you're handling.

But that's exactly the point. If you use tick, jiffy or whatever other non-
standard unit, then you have to define what the other unit is.
That's why ns, us/µs, ms are far better names than nano, micro and milli.

> mtime_t will stay for backward compatibility but IMO it should not be
> used anymore.

I don't mind changing the name to something short and correctly namespaced. 
But it would be utterly vain in any case. The code assumes int64_t in a 
variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, no matter the typedef alias.

> > As far as I am concerned, if you don't specify the time unit in a computer
> > program, you are using local jiffies, not seconds. Talk about confusing.
> > 
> > ISO C uses nsec, not nano. SI uses ms, µs and ns with us as the defacto
> > standard transliteration of µs.
> 
> We could use nsec instead of nano to align with the standard. But then
> msec could be either milliseconds or microseconds.

Not really. VLC did confuse m for micro. But in the standards, it's always u/µ 
for micro and m for milli.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/