coming from PHP, it's incredible how many times I've been bitten by glitches with managing time with JS clientside.
Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
221–230 of 284 posts
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
// call foo() one day from now: sleep(86400); foo();
What you want there is to stop saying "day" and instead say "24 hours." This way the code is correct and you don't need to deal with time weirdness.
No, because if I want something to happen everyday at 12 o'clock, I have to wait for one day, if I wait for 24 hours, I will be off by an hour for half of the year.
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#223From the article: const now = new Date(); The Temporal equivalent is: const now = Temporal.Now.zonedDateTimeISO(); Dear god, that's so much uglier! I mean, I guess it's two steps forward and one step back ... but couldn't they have come up with something that was just two steps forward, and none back ... instead of making us write this nightmare all over the place? Why not? const now = DateTime();
I also find it super more complicated and messy than what you can find in another language without proper justification.
Like the Temporal.Instant with the only difference that is now but in nanosecond. Would have been better to be Now with a suffix to indicate that it is more precise. Or even better, it is just the function you use or parameter that give the precision.
And why Now as the name space? I would expect the opposite, like python, you have something like Temporal.Date, and from there you get a date of now or a specific time, with or without timezone info, ...
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#224[flagged]
ai;dr
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#225TIL temporal_rs was a thing. Not to be biased, but I think it's awesome how much Rust is used in the JS ecosystem. I saw Vite using oxc in some parts. Love it!
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
// call foo() one day from now: sleep(86400); foo();
What you want there is to stop saying "day" and instead say "24 hours." This way the code is correct and you don't need to deal with time weirdness.
You seem to assume that a day always has 24 hours. Common (but not only) non-24h day lengths are:
- 23 hours
- 25 hours
- 24 hours 1 second
- 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds
You could assume that a day isn't exactly 24 hours, but it's close-ish to 24 hours. Nope, not even close.
And that assumes that we can treat an hour as a precise measure of time (we can't). On some systems, even a second is not a precise measure of time (second smearing).
To make things worse, those are "simple" edge cases.
Time is hard. I'm not sure if I can make any statement about time that is true.
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#227I'm very happy about this. The fact that Temporal forces you to actually deal with the inherent complexities of time management (primarily the distinction between an instant and a calendar datetime) makes it incredibly difficult to make the mistakes that Date almost seems designed to cause. It's a bit more verbose, but I'll take writing a handful of extra characters over being called at 3AM to fix a DST related bug a…
Agreed. We've almost eradicated our usage of JS Date - fixing plenty of bugs along the way, and then I extracted thousands of lines of conversions and formatting from our production app (scheduling focused) into a temporal-fun package to make it Temporal more ergonomic for lots of common cases. npmjs.com/package/temporal-fun
That looks neat although your package is missing a link to the source repository.
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a real pain point and I run into the same tension in systems where data crosses serialization boundaries constantly. The prototype-stripping problem you're describing with JSON.parse/stringify is a specific case of a more general issue: rich domain objects don't survive wire transfer without a reconstitution step. That said, I think the Temporal team made the right call here. Date-time logic is one of those d…
Sounds like we need an extended JSON with the express intent of conveying common extended values and rich objects: DateTime instants (with calendar system & timezone), Decimal, BigInt, etc.
I think a more practical and compatible approach is to keep json as it is, and use a side channel (e.g. an openapi spec) to convey metadata.
Then it is up to the client to decide that a date returned as a string is a date or string, or to create a specific class instead of a generic object
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#229I'm very happy about this. The fact that Temporal forces you to actually deal with the inherent complexities of time management (primarily the distinction between an instant and a calendar datetime) makes it incredibly difficult to make the mistakes that Date almost seems designed to cause. It's a bit more verbose, but I'll take writing a handful of extra characters over being called at 3AM to fix a DST related bug a…
Agreed. We've almost eradicated our usage of JS Date - fixing plenty of bugs along the way, and then I extracted thousands of lines of conversions and formatting from our production app (scheduling focused) into a temporal-fun package to make it Temporal more ergonomic for lots of common cases. npmjs.com/package/temporal-fun
Word of warning Temporal relies on the Intl API for formatting, and support in Chrome is very limited due to their binary size constraints. As a result, you'll need to polyfill unsupported languages using format.js
Re: Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
#230And yet another modernisation of the web platform sabotaged by Apple and their misguided (malicious?) refusal to update their devices continually. https://caniuse.com/temporal It will take years until this can be widely used as intended.
The spec hasn't even reached stage 4 yet. Chrome only added support 58 days ago. Safari already added support in their alphas.