WASI Clocks

A proposed WebAssembly System Interface API.

Current Phase

WASI-clocks is currently in Phase 2.

Champions

Dan Gohman

Phase 4 Advancement Criteria

WASI clocks must have host implementations which can pass the testsuite on at least Windows, macOS, and Linux.

WASI clocks must have at least two complete independent implementations.

Introduction
Goals
Non-goals
API walk-through
- Use case 1
- Use case 2
Detailed design discussion
- [Tricky design choice 1]
- [Tricky design choice 2]
Considered alternatives
- [Alternative 1]
- [Alternative 2]
Stakeholder Interest & Feedback
References & acknowledgements

Introduction

WASI Clocks is a WASI API for reading the current time and measuring elapsed time.

Unlike many clock APIs, WASI Clocks is capability-oriented. Instead of having functions that implicitly reference a clock, WASI clocks' APIs are passed a clock handle.

Goals

The primary goal of WASI Clocks is to allow users to use WASI programs to read the current time and to measure elapsed time.

Non-goals

WASI Clocks is not aiming to cover timezones, daylight savings time, date formatting, or modifying the time of a clock.

API walk-through

Measuring elapsed time

The monotonic clock APIs can be used to measure the elapsed time of a region of code:

default-monotonic-clock: monotonic-clock

   let clock: MonotonicClock = default_monotonic_clock();

   let start: Instant = monotonic_clock_now(clock);

   // some stuff

   let stop: Instant = monotonic_clock_now(clock);

   let elapsed: Instant = stop - start;

Telling the current human time:

    let clock: WallClock = default_wall_clock();

    let the_current_time = wall_clock_now();

    println!("it has been {} seconds and {} nanoseconds since the Unix epoch!", the_current_time.seconds, the_current_time.nanoseconds);

Detailed design discussion

What should the type of a timestamp be?

In POSIX, clock_gettime uses a single timespec type to represent timestamps from all clocks, with two fields: seconds and nanoseconds. However, in applications that just need to measure elapsed time, and don't need to care about wall clock time, working with seconds and nanoseconds as separate fields adds extra code size and complexity. For these use cases, a single 64-bit nanoseconds value, which can measure up to about 584 years, is sufficient and simpler.

For wall clock time, it's still useful to have both seconds and nanoseconds, both to be able to represent dates in the far future, and to reflect the fact that code working with wall clock time will often want to treat seconds and fractions of seconds differently.

And so, this API uses different data types for different types of clocks.

Considered alternatives

Per-process and per-thread clocks

WASI preview1 included two clocks which measured the CPU time of the current process and the current thread, respectively. These clocks are difficult to implement efficiently in WASI implementations that have multiple wasm instances in the same host process, so they've been omitted from this API.

Wasi-libc has support for emulating these clocks, by using the monotonic clock instead, which isn't a technically precise replacement, but is enough to ensure minimal compatibility with existing code.

Stakeholder Interest & Feedback

TODO before entering Phase 3.

Preview1 has monotonic and wall clock functions, and they're widely exposed in toolchains.

References & acknowledgements

Many thanks for valuable feedback and advice from:

[Person 1]
[Person 2]
[etc.]

sunfishcode / wasi-clocks