[GemStone-Smalltalk] DateAndTime users' questionnaire

[Bruce Badger]

Good choice Mang.

YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (even with the decimal) conforms to ISO 8601 ... following
the standard rarely hurts.  And if I read your times in light of the
standard I even know the time zone .. Z/UTC/GMT (hoping that is what you
intend!)

Good to hear that GemStone are looking at canonicalising date-times.  When
I was working with GemStone (happy days) I tended to just use >>now to make
a new one, but I'd make sure to persist them as Mang does ... not least
because the ISO 8601 integer approach can be moved around between systems
without being messed up by various oh-so-clever date time libraries in
languages, databases etc.

All the best,
    Bruce




On Wed, 24 Jun 2020 at 06:01, Wai Lun Mang via GemStone-Smalltalk <
gemstone-smalltalk at lists.gemtalksystems.com> wrote:

> I was working on a Shipping operation application called IRIS2 long time
> ago.  We canonicalized the DataTime to reduce the number of instances
> created that represent the same time.  Our resolution is 1 minute to reduce
> the number of instances we need to create.
>
> Recently, while working on a Java application we also need DateTime, we
> represented DateTime using the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.mmm.  This format can
> be represented as an Integer (64bit) in GemStone.  In GemStone, if I
> remember correctly it does not create a new object but embedded 64 bit
> Integer in the object pointer.  So no extra space taken.  And you can
> implement getter and setter that can dynamically return a transient
> DateTime object.  I used this technique in Java because we cached a lot of
> objects in the VM.  This will save a lot of memory space.
>
> This YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.mmm representation is much more readable but at a
> cost of converting when you need to print them.
>
> Mang
>
> On Friday, June 19, 2020, 06:37:06 PM PDT, Paul Baumann via
> GemStone-Smalltalk <gemstone-smalltalk at lists.gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
>
>
> I'm excited for this change, it will make a huge performance difference
> having dates as immediates.
>
> I had done this in tuning in application code where most beneficial. It
> would persist an immediate integer that was seconds, ms, or ns from an
> epoch datetime. Replication to gbs was then a very efficiently of course as
> cache costs were skipped. The slot contained the integer and accessor
> methods made it look like a datetime was stored. The accessor methods used
> DateTime extensions (like maybe #ms:fromEpoch:, #seconds:fromEpoch:
> #msFromEpoch:, and #secondsFromEpoch:) to do conversions between integer
> and DateTime instances according to the epoch and granularity the accessors
> had consistently specified for the slot in both objectspaces (gbs and gs).
> This allowed for incremental application tuning and epoch control most
> efficient for the attribute needs.
>
> The epoch that I selected for most slots was probably 1/1/2000, but it
> might have also been more recent if the attribute didn't need older dates
> stored efficiently. Sorry, I don't recall what epoch and granularity was
> generally most useful for most attributes. If polymorphism can be assumed
> then you might as well pick an epoch in the near future and dates forward
> will become more efficient.
>
> Paul Baumann
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 7:46 PM Martin McClure via GemStone-Smalltalk <
> gemstone-smalltalk at lists.gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
>
> If you use DateAndTime in your GemStone application, we at GemTalk would
> very much appreciate your feedback on the questions below.
>
> At customer request, we're working on a SmallDateAndTime class for
> GemStone -- a "Special" (immediate) version of DateAndTime that relates
> to DateAndTime similarly to the relationship between SmallInteger and
> LargeInteger. For customers with many persistent DateAndTime instances,
> this should improve both space and time performance.
>
> There are design tradeoffs in resolution, range, printing, etc., and it
> will help us make better decisions if we know how DateAndTime is being
> used now.
>
> (1) Which of the following messages do you use to create DateAndTime
> instances?
>   * DateAndTime now
>   * DateAndTime nowWithScale:
>   * DateAndTime fromString:
>   * DateAndTime year:day:hour* or year:month:day:hour*
>   * Other protocol
>
> (2) Do you need DateAndTimes with resolution finer than a microsecond?
>
> (3) What is your year range of DateAndTime; do you need or use
> DateAndTimes more than 5/10/50 years into the future (or the past)?
>
> (4) How do you handle DateAndTime printing?
>
> (5) Have you created a subclass of DateAndTime or DateAndTimeANSI, or
> added your own methods to DateAndTime or DateAndTimeANSI?  If this is
> general functionality that could be useful to include in the base,
> please let us know.
>
> (6) DateAndTime instances would need to be immutable, to be
> interoperable with SmallDateAndTime. If you are using methods that do
> update a DateAndTime, such as offset: or beRounded, does your code
> expect the receiver to be modified?
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