hgf also provides various utilities that may be helpful but are not strictly necessary.

In hgf.util.timer there are two classes, Time, Timer, and CountdownTimer.

The Time class represents a day, hour, month, second, millisecond tuple with attributes named d, h, m, s, ms, respectively. These attributes are properties, and changes to one of them will be distributed appropriately (including handling of non-integral values). Time objects may be added and subtracted.

Known issue: Negative time is not handled properly so it should be avoided when possible (though arithmetic with negative time will get the correct result).

The Timer class uses Time internally. It acts as a stopwatch that counts up from 0, with methods start, pause, unpause, reset, and restart. Note that start takes an optional argument allowing Timer to start at any Time.

The CountdownTimer class is a subclass of Timer. The only difference is that it counts down and then stops when it reaches 0.