Building a Timing Utility That Can't Corrupt Its Own Stats — Even When Your Code Throws

Most ad-hoc timing code in Python looks like this: start = time . perf_counter () result = do_work () elapsed = time . perf_counter () - start stats [ name ]. append ( elapsed ) It works, until do_work() raises. Then the line that records the timing never runs, the exception propagates, and the one call that was probably slowest — the one that failed — is silently missing from your stats. If you're using timing data to find what's expensive, the failing case is exactly the one you can least afford to lose. timerx is a small, dependency-free Python timing library — a decorator, a context manager, and named stopwatches, all backed by one stats store. The one rule that shapes the whole implementation: a timing gets recorded whether or not the timed code raised. Decision 1: finally , everywhere, no exceptions to the rule @functools.wraps ( target ) def wrapper ( * args : Any , ** kwargs : Any ) -> Any : started = self . _clock () try : return target ( * args , ** kwargs ) finally : elapsed = self . _clock () - started with self . _lock : self . _record ( label , elapsed ) return wrapper The async wrapper is the identical shape with await added. The context manager ( _Lap ) does the same thing structurally, just split across __enter__ / __exit__ instead of try / finally : def __exit__ ( self , * exc_info : object ) -> bool : if self . _started is None : raise RuntimeError ( " timerx lap exited before it was entered " ) elapsed = self . _timer . _clock () - self . _started with self . _timer . _lock : self . _timer . _record ( self . _name , elapsed ) return False Note the return False — __exit__ deliberately never swallows the exception. It records the timing and lets the exception continue propagating unchanged, because a timing library has exactly one job here: observe, not intervene. A version that suppressed exceptions to "clean up" would be actively dangerous to drop into someone else's codebase. Three entry points — decorator, context manager, stopwatch — and all t