Cannot represent instants before the program start

[Rodrigodd]

In one of my projects, I have the necessity of representing an arbitrary instant in time, which include instants before the program start.

The current implementation relies on creating a Duration from performe.now(). Because performe.now() return the time since the creation of the page/web worker, and because Duration cannot represent negative values, the Wasm version of Instant can only represent a small range of past instants.

[daxpedda]

Is wasn't able to reproduce this and was also not able to find any information on it, could you elaborate how this can happen?

[Rodrigodd]

@daxpedda This line panics with 'overflow when subtracting durations' (if your program has not being running for a 100s):

let _ = Instant::now() - Duration::from_secs(100);

I added a test to my PR to test this.

[daxpedda]

Isn't this as intended? std::time::Instant should behave the same, see source.

So the behavior seems correct to me.

[Rodrigodd]

The std implementation only panics if you subtract something like u64::MAX seconds from Instant::now(), not just any Duration greater than the program current execution time.

[daxpedda]

Well yes, but that is not behavior that you should rely on. The starting point of the underlying clock is not defined by Rust.

The reason this currently works on Linux is because std uses clock_gettime:

All implementations support the system-wide realtime clock, which is identified by CLOCK_REALTIME. Its time represents seconds and nanoseconds since the Epoch.

So the starting time is since the UNIX epoch. So unless your computer boots with a time set to 1970 it will always be much bigger then 0.

On Windows for example, std uses QueryPerformanceCounter, which doesn't start from the UNIX epoch, 0 can be the start of when you boot. So the example you posted above might fail on Windows.

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That said, looking at your PR, it seems to me that probably the better way to do this is to add Performance.timeOrigin to the calculation instead of shifting the whole number to an arbitrary point.

In any case, from a general-purpose library standpoint, an additional calculation is additional overhead for a non-conforming use-case, imho.

[Rodrigodd]

Yes, you are right, on Windows I can get my example to panic with a value as little as 20_000 seconds, which matches with the time since boot behavior. So I should not really be relying on that.

I could argue that they should be able to handle negative values (because both Windows and POSIX appear to return signed values), but some platforms may not, and that is also beyond this issue.

So fell free to close this issue.

[daxpedda]

Apologies I gave the wrong impression here, I'm not a maintainer of this repo.

However, shameless plug, I was interested in this issue because I recently released web-time to tackle some of the issues in this repo.