Nanotime

nanosecond precision time

Nanotime provides a time object that keeps time as the number of nanoseconds since the UNIX epoch. In other words, it is a 64bit UNIX timestamp with nanosecond precision.

https://github.com/jbenet/nanotime

Why yet another time type!?

Over and over, I found the need for a portable, easy to process time type. The good old Unix timestamp was perfect except for the lack of precision. Finding no better alternative, I decided to make my own to fit my needs: a uint64 count of nanoseconds since the unix epoch.

What about timespec and timeval?

While timevals and timespecs add the much needed precision (usec and nsec), they do so in a cumbersome way. They store the extra precision in a second uint32 rather than in one whole field. While this preserves quick access to the sec part of the time value, adding and subtracting timespecs and timevals is not as simple as integer operations. For most of my use cases, I found myself comparing, adding, subtracting time values much more than outputting them. Furthermore, I tend to require the sub-second precision when printing out, storing, and transferring (or anything else the sec field used to satisfy) anyway.

What about ISO? It's perfectly portable and searchable!

And slow and heavy. Sometimes you want a lighter and faster type, for quick comparisons of lots of data (entry bookkeeping, packet timestamping).

What about MS DateTime?

While MS DateTime does store the...entire number in one field, they chose to count the odd measure of 100-nanosecond intervals (dubbed ticks, not to be confused with processor ticks). If this weren't enough, MS DateTime also starts off from the year 0000 AD, since they could never bear to use the Unix Epoch. While I'm all for multi-millennia software, this introduces the cumbersome problems of leap seconds and calendar uncertainty.

Range:

2 ^ 64 nanoseconds is roughly ~ 584.554531 years. The timespan between 1970 to 2554 is more than enough for me.

Then again, it may be best to use a range of 292 around 1970. If I find the need to go much earlier than 1970 in a non-textual representation, I may revise this.

Implementations

There are currently implementations in:

• C -- struct nanotime
• C++ -- nanotime::Time
• Obj-C -- nanotime (C) and NSDate category
• Python -- nanotime

included in this source.

License

Nanotime is under the MIT License.