Issues with struct timespec

[Mark Pizzolato - pthreads - win32 <MarkPizzolato-pthreads-win32 at subscriptions dot pizzolato dot net>]

Hi there,

In the older versions of pthreads-win32 struct timespec had a tv_sec member which was of type long.

In the current CVS code base this member has been changed to be of type time_t.  

The only reason struct timespec exists in pthreads-win32 is to support pthread_cond_timedwait().  Pthread.h is providing a definition for struct timespec since, in general there is no other use of that structure in a win32 programming environment.  It is unique to pthreads.

A problem exists for an application which may use the provided struct timespec definition with pthread_cond_timedwait().  If that application is linking against a prebuilt version of the pthreads code (the most common case), the pthreads library will have been built with a time_t type which is whatever the current compiler/build default size for that type (64bits these days, but 32bits in the past).  Meanwhile, the application using pthreads can have a time_t type which could be 32 or 64 bits completely depending on compile time defines.  Calls to pthread_cond_timedwait() will be passing a struct timespec which may or may not have a time_t element size consistent with the time_t in use when the pthread library was built.  

I would suggest that struct timespec should use a non variable sized type for the tv_sec member.  A type of long should be just fine for normal uses of pthread_cond_timedwait() for most of the next 36 years.  A 64bit type could just as well be used if all of the pthread-win32 target platforms support 64bit numbers, or it could be a fixed size but be specific to the platform as needed.

While we're here, anyone who uses a struct timespec passed to pthread_cond_timedwait() actually needs to construct the contents of that structure in some way.  We may want to provide a clock_gettime() implementation as part of pthreads-win32 to make the use of this API a little more natural and/or portable.

I'll be glad to suggest specific code for these ideas depending on what others think of the issue.

Looking forward to a discussion.

- Mark Pizzolato