Resources

Level: reference

The talk the first chapter follows

Matt Godbolt — Benchmarking: It's About Time. Closing keynote, C++Now 2026; published 2026-07-14, 97 minutes. Video ↗ · slides ↗ · slide source ↗. The source is BSD 2-Clause, © 2026 Hudson River Trading LLC, and holds more than the deck: the speaker notes (notes.md), research notes, and the benchmark harness the talk's numbers came from.

The standard

Cited by stable name from the working draft at eel.is:

• Clock requirements ↗ — the six members every clock has
• system_clock ↗, steady_clock ↗, high_resolution_clock ↗
• Non-member time_point arithmetic ↗ — the single Clock parameter behind the Type safety slide
• clock_cast ↗
• Timing specifications ↗ — why sleep_for waits at least as long as asked
• The as-if rule ↗ — and what counts as observable behaviour
• numeric_limits, the primary template ↗
• Class member lookup ↗ — paragraph 6 is the rule behind GCC's "changes meaning"

References

• cppreference: the chrono library ↗ — its high_resolution_clock page records the argument about deprecating that name
• Google Benchmark user guide ↗, and utils.h ↗, where DoNotOptimize and ClobberMemory are defined
• Python's time module ↗ — for the bridges on each page

Proposals

• P0342R0 — Timing barriers ↗, Mike Spertus, 2016
• P0412R0 — Benchmarking Primitives ↗, Mikhail Maltsev, 2016
• P1152R0 — Deprecating volatile ↗, JF Bastien, 2018

The implementations, at the source

• libstdc++ — bits/chrono.h ↗, with the high_resolution_clock alias and the _V2 namespace, and src/c++11/chrono.cc ↗, with what steady_clock::now() calls and its fallback
• libc++ — src/chrono.cpp ↗: CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW on Apple platforms, since a change in 2020 ↗
• MSVC STL — __msvc_chrono.hpp ↗

Books

• Nicolai M. Josuttis, The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference, 2nd ed. (Addison-Wesley, 2012), §5.7 "Clocks and Timers", from p. 143 — the C++11 design of durations, clocks and time points, including the history that steady_clock was first proposed as monotonic_clock.