How to get current time as long or ulong?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 10:19:19AM -0700, Charles Hixson via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
[...]
> The same time needs to be used for two different purposes (or I have
> to keep two separate times).  One time is used during a particular run
> of the program to compare when two different things happened. This
> needs fine discrimination...millisecond level.  The other needs to be
> used to order events happening over a period of time.  This needs to
> be at the hour level, and the minute level is better.  But it needs to
> work over years.  That's why I originally said UnixTime...and UnixTime
> would work fine, but problems might happen if it were in use in
> 2029(?*).  Since D supports a 64 bit time, not using it would seem to
> be unreasonable.  I looked into scaling it, but either I use more than
> 32 bits, or I need to keep two times.  So the long version of SysTime
> seems to be what I want.  That will even let me compare things against
> books published in the Classical Greek period, and doesn't threaten to
> roll over.  It's more precise than I need, but there's no one time of
> lesser precision that will do everything I want.

The problem with this is that the system clock may change.  Would your
program continue to function correctly if, during execution, the user
changes the system clock? Or if the OS in the background syncs with a
remote NTP server and loses/gains a few seconds/minutes during which
events are happening that record timestamps? I.e., some events might
have their timestamps out-of-order with the actual sequence of events if
you use system time.


T

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