For simple high-frequency time deltas, I've found this function wins on the perf front:

  //go:linkname nanotime runtime.nanotime
  func nanotime() int64

This package spawns a goroutine that updates an atomic value every second based on a time.Time from a time.Ticker, and its functions load that atomic value. This is not really comparable to anything in package time in any useful way...

It's a bit specialized though, it's just a cached value of a time.NewTicker updating once per second and the article talks about this in the "Schedule Based on Monotonic Time" section

Wait, I see it's been removed actually [1]. Why, isn't it faster anymore?

[1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/commit/c2...

It's not removed, it's moved to a separate file as it's problematic to use in tests, commit 06c2631 talks about why.