BSON_GET_MONOTONIC_TIME(3)

🕰️ BSON_GET_MONOTONIC_TIME(3) — the libbson clock situation, explained 💅

okay bestie, so this is a page straight out of libbson, and it's literally the entire lore of how the BSON library handles time. it's short, it's iconic, and it's gonna make your timeouts behave. let's go ✨

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🌈 BSON Clock Abstraction

this is the ✨vibe✨ of the whole page: Libbson has a little clock abstraction, and the whole point of it is that it gives you a cross-platform way to handle timeouts within the BSON library. like, it does the messy platform-difference work so you don't have to 🫶

the way that it does that is it abstracts the differences in implementations of gettimeofday(), and on top of that it hands you a monotonic (incrementing only) clock in microseconds — which, no cap, is the good one, because monotonic means it only ever goes up 🔥

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

int64_t
bson_get_monotonic_time (void);
int
bson_gettimeofday (struct timeval *tv);

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

The clock abstraction in Libbson provides a cross-platform way to handle timeouts within the BSON library. It abstracts the differences in implementations of gettimeofday() as well as providing a monotonic (incrementing only) clock in microseconds. 🦋

so yeah — two things happening here, and both of them are main character energy 👑

• one: it smooths over all the different ways platforms implement gettimeofday(), so you get one consistent thing to code against instead of a million little surprises 😭
• two: it gives you that monotonic clock, and monotonic means incrementing only, measured in microseconds ⏱️

🎀 reminder: monotonic = only ever goes up. that's the whole slay. don't expect it to line up with wall-clock time, because that's not what it's giving.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

MongoDB, Inc

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🌸 COPYRIGHT 🌸

2009-present, MongoDB, Inc.

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and that's the whole page, bestie — short and sweet, we ate and left no crumbs 🍓

✨ sign-off time ✨ this was libbson version 2.5.6, dated Oct 09, 2026, page BSON_GET_MONOTONIC_TIME(3) — see you in the group chat 💜🎀🫶