There are two aspects, such functions tend to generate slightly larger and
slower code.
In other languages one would use private or protected for this, but we don't
have this. I'm not too fond of an inline function, as it would mark it as
some kind of public API, which it isn't. It's just an internal value used by
the timekeeping code, which happens to be needed by a few source files. If
you want to make a little more private, it would be better to move it to
header under kernel/time/.
bye, Roman
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