This code uses QueryPerformanceCounter() [**] on Windows,
mach_absolute_time() on OSX, clock_gettime() where available, and
gettimeofday() [*] elsewhere.
Timer types are stored in an opaque OS-specific format; the only
supported operation is to compute the difference between two timers.
[*] As you know, gettimeofday() isn't monotonic, so we include
a simple ratchet function to ensure that it only moves forward.
[**] As you may not know, QueryPerformanceCounter() isn't actually
always as monotonic as you might like it to be, so we ratchet that
one too.
We also include a "coarse monotonic timer" for cases where we don't
actually need high-resolution time. This is GetTickCount{,64}() on
Windows, clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE) on Linux, and falls
back to regular monotonic time elsewhere.
