Subject: Re: bug#55163: 29.0.50; master 4a1f69ebca (TICKS . HZ) for current-time broke lsp-mode

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 12:38:19 -0700

On 4/29/22 04:10, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Then why again would we want to come up with new functions for
> handling timestamps? just because the existing ones have names that
> make discovery difficult, or are there other reasons?

I think Lars is saying both, though the other reasons are more important.

Lars makes a good point that common idioms like 
(file-attribute-modification-time (file-attributes F)) generate 
unnecessary garbage. And it's more than just GC overhead: at a lower 
level, 'statx' on GNU/Linux can be significantly more efficient than 
plain 'stat' when retrieving just a subset of stat info (such as, just 
the file timestamp).

Getting various flavors of the current time is another issue. This 
related to the polishing that Stefan referred to with the new CPU time 
primitive.

I'll try to shake some time free to think about this more.