Another thought on the hires timer to make the hires time and hires time 
units available as 2 other functions in the time module.

For example, function time.ticks() returns the hires time stamp as an 
int.  Function time.ticks2secs(t) converts a given number of ticks to 
seconds.

To avoid duplicating the hires time code in both the time and profile 
modules, it would be necessary to move the hpTimer and hpTimerUnit 
functions to some place inside the Python core accessible for the time 
and profile modules.  Perhaps to a new file, say Python/gethptime.c.

That new file can handle other platform-specific idiosyncrasies with 
respect to hires time.  In particular, it could implement a different 
(and better) way to determine the resolution of a hires tick, e.g. on 
Linux and BSD Unix.