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Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 15:45:53 -0400 From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx> To: musl@...ts.openwall.com Subject: time code progress Hi all, I've been working, as promised, on the time code overhaul for the next release of musl. The main issues it's intended to address are: - complete lack of overflow handling in the present code - lack of support for zoneinfo time zones After trying various things, the design I think I've settled on has the following properties: - Internally, all POSIX times (seconds since epoch) are passed around as long long. This ensures that values derived from struct tm, timezone rules, etc. can never overflow, and allows overflow checking to be deferred until it's time to convert the value back into time_t. Without this design, handling the "partial years" at the edge of time_t overflow range is very difficult, as is handling the denormalized struct tm forms mktime is required to support and normalize (for instance, overflowing the year range by using a very large month number). - Instead of converting back and forth to broken-down struct tm for applying timezone rules, the new code simply converts the combination of year and TZ rule string to a POSIX time within the given year at which the transition occurs. This value has type long long so that it cannot overflow even at the boundary years. Determining whether DST is in effect at a given time is simply a range comparison, just like the comparison that will be used for processing zoneinfo-format timezone rules. - For years within the currently-reasonable range/32-bit time_t, the hot path for converting a year to seconds since the epoch involves no division. We can get away with >>2 and %3 since in the range [1901,2099] the leap year rule is simply that multiple-of-4 years are leap years. I would like it be able to have the compiler throw away the larger, slower, general-case code on 32-bit-time_t targets, but unfortunately the need to use long long internally to avoid difficult corner cases is precluding that. - Any representable struct tm will successfully convert to time_t if and only if it represents a value of seconds-since-the-epoch that fits in time_t. Any representable time_t will successfully convert to struct tm if and only if it represents a (normalized) date and time representable in struct tm. The relevant functions will avoid setting errno except on error so that a caller can distinguish between a time_t value of -1 as a valid result and as an error. I'm not yet sure whether the new code will be larger or smaller than the old code. It should be considerably faster, and most importantly, more correct. Rich
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