Make Time public

[benthecarman]

If we make Time public, this allows for other libraries to implement the handling of time themselves. This could be nice for things like wasm where we can't use the standard library to get the time, but we sitll have access to the time through other libraries.

[TheBlueMatt]

Hmm, I'm certainly not against exposing the time trait to let folks implement it themselves, but this by itself won't let someone compile for wasm as-is - there's plenty of other places in the library where std implies that std::time is available (in fact, its almost the only thing that std implies). We'd have to bound ~everything in the library that has any time lookup with the trait.

[benthecarman]

Yeah it won't help everywhere but at least in some places it can be used, for example the scorer

[dunxen]

Concept ACK

[TheBlueMatt]

At least for the scorer, there's also an alternative way to go - give it timer ticks like we do ChannelManager/PeerManager. The nice thing about going that way is it actually reduces the amount of work we have to do during scoring, and can make routing faster as we no longer have to check + decay bounds during scoring.

[benthecarman]

At least for the scorer, there's also an alternative way to go - give it timer ticks like we do ChannelManager/PeerManager. The nice thing about going that way is it actually reduces the amount of work we have to do during scoring, and can make routing faster as we no longer have to check + decay bounds during scoring.

Yeah I still think where ever this is used, it makes sense to give no-std users the option of having time.

[TheBlueMatt]

In general, yea, so let's see, Time is currently used in:

• payment retry describing - Retry::Timeout, but that's independently gated on std, so we'd have to bound the ChannelManager or do this via timer ticks,
• In the scorer, which I'd personally like to see get replaced with timer ticks for a performance gain.

and I think that's it? So we should consider how to provide Retry::Timeout functionality for no-std, probably, but I think that's best done by moving that whole thing to timer ticks. Then if we move scoring to timer ticks as well to avoid decaying during routing we can drop time entirely rather than expose it :)

[benthecarman]

Yeah that sounds better, if you guys can get that done before next release that'd be great, otherwise I'd be in favor of merging this in the meantime.