psyquartz

A high-performance clock and sleep library for Python, written in Rust with PyO3 bindings. Drop-in replacement for PsychoPy core clocks with ~20x speedup on clock.getTime() (~70 ns vs ~1.5 μs).

Also provides a high-accuracy sleep function that substantially outperforms Python's time.sleep.

Installation

pip install psyquartz

Usage

Clocks

MonotonicClock records the current time at creation. Calling getTime() returns the elapsed seconds since then.

import psyquartz

clock = psyquartz.MonotonicClock()
elapsed = clock.getTime()       # seconds since creation
raw = clock.getTime(applyZero=False)  # raw UNIX epoch time

Clock extends MonotonicClock with the ability to reset and shift the baseline.

clock = psyquartz.Clock()
print(clock.getTime())  # seconds since creation

clock.reset()           # restart from 0
print(clock.getTime())  # close to 0

clock.addTime(1.0)      # shift baseline forward by 1 s
print(clock.getTime())  # close to -1.0

High-accuracy sleep

sleep (and its alias sleepers) uses a hybrid strategy — sleeping for half the remaining duration while more than 200 μs remain, then spin-waiting for the final stretch.

import psyquartz

psyquartz.sleep(0.01)  # accurate 10 ms sleep