Thread stack size is an important performance tuning knob. If your app has 100,000 threads you really do care about running out of memory. If you have 10 threads you don't care. You should of course separate the choice of stack size from your application code. Your library still needs to support this.
"providing absolute timestamps rather than intervals is important because it prevents drift"
I don't know what you mean by "drift". When I put a timeout on a threaded operation (joining, acquiring a mutex, etc.) I am guarding against blocking forever 99% of the time. It is much cleaner to say "this should take no more than 5s" vs. "this should end at XYZ time UTC". Forcing the application to track elapsed time in the face of NTP etc. sucks. Letting the library handle those edge cases is good. It can use a CPU tick counter or similar.
"Fears regarding ntpd causing sudden jumps aren't well-founded (ntpd adjusts time very slowly, in sub-second intervals)"
What if I am sleeping in sub-second intervals? This goes to the general thrust of PHK's article. He is endorsing K&R C and pthreads because they give you minimal tools that can express a very wide range of programs. Building assumptions about how long people want to sleep for into an extremely widely deployed standard is a mistake.
Your comments on thread stack size don't contradict the parent's point. Thread stack size is an implementation detail, and it's also an important performance tuning knob. That implies that it should be a knob that belongs to the system, not the C standard.
Thread stack size is an important performance tuning knob. If your app has 100,000 threads you really do care about running out of memory. If you have 10 threads you don't care. You should of course separate the choice of stack size from your application code. Your library still needs to support this.
"providing absolute timestamps rather than intervals is important because it prevents drift"
I don't know what you mean by "drift". When I put a timeout on a threaded operation (joining, acquiring a mutex, etc.) I am guarding against blocking forever 99% of the time. It is much cleaner to say "this should take no more than 5s" vs. "this should end at XYZ time UTC". Forcing the application to track elapsed time in the face of NTP etc. sucks. Letting the library handle those edge cases is good. It can use a CPU tick counter or similar.
"Fears regarding ntpd causing sudden jumps aren't well-founded (ntpd adjusts time very slowly, in sub-second intervals)"
What if I am sleeping in sub-second intervals? This goes to the general thrust of PHK's article. He is endorsing K&R C and pthreads because they give you minimal tools that can express a very wide range of programs. Building assumptions about how long people want to sleep for into an extremely widely deployed standard is a mistake.