What is mach_absolute_time based on on iPhone

Had some trouble with this myself. There isn’t a lot of good documentation, so I went with experimentation. Here’s what I was able to determine:

mach_absolute_time depends on the processor of the device. It returns ticks since the device was last rebooted (otherwise known as uptime). In order to get it in a human readable form, you have to modify it by the result from mach_timebase_info (a ratio), which will return billionth of seconds (or nanoseconds). To make this more usable I use a function like the one below:

#include <mach/mach_time.h>

int getUptimeInMilliseconds()
{
    const int64_t kOneMillion = 1000 * 1000;
    static mach_timebase_info_data_t s_timebase_info;

    static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
    dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
        (void) mach_timebase_info(&s_timebase_info);
    });

    // mach_absolute_time() returns billionth of seconds,
    // so divide by one million to get milliseconds
    return (int)((mach_absolute_time() * s_timebase_info.numer) / (kOneMillion * s_timebase_info.denom));
}

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