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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Time zone transition changes happen all the time. Once you start storing datetimes in the future, you're in a bit of a precarious position here. Moreover, this is a standardized interchange format that other libraries will know how to read/write. (It's relatively newly standardized, but has been used in practice among other datetime libraries.)
I think you also glossed over some of my other points. How do you write your serialization code using Chrono? Does it work with both
chrono-tzandtzfile?The point is almost never about "it is literally impossible to accomplish task foo," but rather, it matters how it's approach and how easy it is to do. And if you have to rely on your users having very specific domain knowledge about this, it's likely there will be errors. As my design docs state, I didn't only make Jiff to offer more functionality. I also made it because I felt like the APIs could be better. That's a very subjective valuation, and I find arguments of the type, "well I can just use the old library in this way as long as I hold it right and it actually works just fine" to be missing the forest for the trees.
Something like this?
It can support tzfile too around the wire if it starts to expose tz names in a future version.
Again, to be clear, I'm not saying it's impossible to do. But in order to do it, you have to build your own abstractions. And even then, you still can't do it because
tzfiledoesn't give you enough to do it. Andtzfilehas a platform specific API with no caching, so every time you parse a datetime with a tz ID in it, it's completely reloading the TZif data from disk.Some of these things are implementation quality issues that can be fixed. Others are library design problems where you can achieve your objective by building your own abstractions. Like do you really not see this as something that shouldn't be mentioned in a comparison between these crates? You must recognize the difference between what you're doing and just plopping a
Zonedin your struct, derivingSerializeandDeserialize, and then just letting the library do the right thing for you. And that mentioning this is appropriate in the context of the "facts of comparison" because it translates into a real user experience difference for callers.If that's how it was framed in the comparison, it would have been fine. But my original objection was regarding the
Local+FixedOffsetexample which, IMVHO, toys, if ever so slightly, with disingenuity (no offense or aggression intended, I'm a fan).OK, fair enough. What should it say instead? Just omit the mention of
DateTime<Local>? I used it because it's literally the only way toderive(Deserialize)in Chrono in a way that gives you DST aware arithmetic on the result without getting time zone information via some out-of-band mechanism.Actually, I may have been too finicky about this myself.
Since I often write my own wrapping serialization code for use with non-serde formats, I didn't realize that
chrono::DateTime<chorono_tz::Tz>wasn't serde-serializable, even with theserdefeature enabled for both crates. That's where the biggest problem probably lies.In the example, using
chorono_tz::Tz, and only converting to-be-serialized values toFixedOffsetwould probably put better focus on where the limitations/issues actually lie.OK, I've beefed that example up a little bit: https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff/commit/08dfdde204c739e38147faf70b648e2d417d1c2e
I think the comparison is a bit more muddied now and probably worse overall to be honest. Maybe removing
DateTime<Local>is the right thing to do. I'll think on it.It's a subtle comparison to make... Probably most people don't even realize that they're doing the wrong thing.