An important difference is that you are not modifying the state, though it is still there. There is one problem - time is limited to the range of values the giv

An important difference is that you are not modifying the state, though it is still there. There is one problem - time is limited to the range of values the given type can contain and since it's often a floating point type, the farther from zero you go, the less precision you have. Depending on how exactly you use the time variable, the loss of precision can become catastrophic long before the ulps get larger than a nanosecond.