News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Let's restart counting Unix timestamp to from 2020. Parent comment

Re:Let's restart counting Unix timestamp to from 2020 by LinuxBender on Friday March 17, 2023 @04:26PM (#35202435)
It sounds like the problem being described is not that Unix epoch starts in 1970 but rather that it's 32 bit. Perhaps there is a way to make this 64 bits and maintain some backwards compatibility? I am not a proper developer so perhaps someone could postulate whether or not this would be feasible.

[Edit] Answering my own question it appears some systems have already addressed this by moving to 64 bit time [1] thus kicking the can down the road 292 billion years in both directions.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Let's restart counting Unix timestamp to from 2020 by touchpadder on Friday March 17, 2023 @04:34PM (#35202554)
Sure, using 64bits is one way but many devices i.e. IOT don't need 64bit support. 64 bit will definitely be a standard, but a concurrent standard can be implemented to allow keeping the time in 32 bits. Starting a new epoch every 50 years could be one. So starting from 1 Jan 2020 we're in epoch 2 now
[ Parent | on HN ]