[Tinyos-devel] Re: [Tinyos Core WG] time sync interfaces

[Matt Welsh]

Right.

On Dec 18, 2007, at 6:42 PM, Philip Levis wrote:

> On Dec 18, 2007, at 3:09 PM, Matt Welsh wrote:
>
>> The applications that we study generally require millisecond or  
>> better time synchronization. In general anything that is timing  
>> sensitive is going to want to exploit the capabilities of the  
>> platform on which it is being developed. A platform-independent  
>> time interface is not very useful in these cases. If we're  
>> concerned about things like portability for, say, time sync  
>> protocols, I suggest that we make the datatype representing time be  
>> very fine-grained (say, 1 usec or better) and provide a compile- 
>> time constant indicating the true resolution.
>>
>
> The typical way to do this is to have a two-typed interface, where  
> the first is the timer fidelity and the second is the width. E.g.,
>
> interface SynchronizedTime<a, b>;
>
> interface SynchronizedTime<TMicro, uint32_t>
>
> That way you get compile-time checks, rather than depend on compile- 
> time constants for resolution.
>
> Phil