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Time

Aether provides two built-in time functions: clock() for measuring elapsed time, and sleep() for pausing execution.

clock()

Returns the current Unix timestamp as a float (seconds since the Unix epoch).

let now = clock()
println(now)  // 1714252800.123456

Precision is microsecond (6 decimal places). Use two clock() calls to measure elapsed time:

let start = clock()
// ... work ...
let elapsed = clock() - start
println("Took ${elapsed} seconds")

sleep(seconds)

Pauses execution for the given number of seconds. Accepts int or float.

sleep(2)      // pause 2 seconds
sleep(0.5)    // pause 500ms

When set_workers(n) is active or AETHER_IO_WORKERS is set, sleep runs on the I/O pool and does not block the main thread — use await sleep(n) in that case.

Examples

Timing a function

fn time_it(func) {
    let start = clock()
    func()
    println("Elapsed: ${clock() - start}s")
}

fn main() {
    time_it(fn() {
        let s = 0
        for i in range(0, 1000000) { s = s + i }
    })
}

Rate limiting

fn main() {
    for i in range(0, 5) {
        println("Task ${i} at ${clock()}")
        sleep(1.0)
    }
}

Retry with exponential backoff

fn retry(func, max_attempts) {
    let delay = 0.5
    for attempt in range(0, max_attempts) {
        try {
            return func()
        } catch(e) {
            if (attempt < max_attempts - 1) {
                sleep(delay)
                delay = delay * 2
            }
        }
    }
    throw "All ${max_attempts} attempts failed"
}

Limitations