Feature request: Consider adding time functions

[rameshvenk]

First of all, thank you for making this. I've found it very useful and quite fast in processing large csv files.

One item that I find useful is GNU Awk's time functions. While I understand GoAWK conforms to Posix specs, would it be possible to add this feature?

Note: I currently use srand as or system("date") as a workaround, but it would be awesome if GoAwk supports it natively

[benhoyt]

Hi @rameshvenk, glad you're finding GoAWK useful. Are you using it from Go (eg, calling interp.Exec) or from the command line ($ goawk ...)? If you're using it from Go you can pass in custom functions (see Example (Funcs) here). If not, yes, system("date") is your best bet right now.

In terms of whether I'd add these: I'm not sure. I don't want GoAWK to become Gawk-compatible, and I'm not quite sure where to draw the line. So far I've mostly been drawing the line at POSIX features, so I think adding these is unlikely.d

[rameshvenk]

Hi, I’m currently using it with GNU parallel to process tsv files and it’s been faster than gawk in my testing. I understand your point of view for keeping it POSIX compatible. Thanks again for building this.