Support JS Temporal for dates and times

[jjspace]

Feature

A modern API for working with date and time, meant to supersede the original Date API.

Temporal is meant to replace Date and be much more useful with more precision (down to nanosecond) and standard ways to interact with the concepts of Date and Time (even different calendars). It also has things builtin like Temporal.Duration type objects.

• Javascript Temporal is coming
• Temporal API Docs

I'm opening this mostly as an FYI to get it on our radar to keep an eye on going forward. The first implementations only just recently dropped in Firefox Nightly and Safari Tech preview.

Very long term I could see this potentially replacing JulianDate. More near term we may want to look at implementing conversion functions like we already have for Date objects to support developers that start to use Temporal in their applications.

I'm personally very excited about the new API and can foresee lots of other devs jumping at the chance to use it in newer applications as it stabilizes in more browsers.

[ggetz]

Makes sense to be compatible with the API once stabilized in browsers.

Being based on the International Atomic Time standard ,JulianDate provides additional precision than Date. So I would be hesitant to recommend replacing outright it unless Temporal has equivalent precision, which I couldn't glean from the docs.

[jjspace]

I would be hesitant to recommend replacing outright it unless Temporal has equivalent precision, which I could glean from the docs.

AFAIK in general Temporal is designed to support nanosecond precision which is much better than Date's millisecond. Maybe we still have more with JulianDate but I would expect Temporal should be much better for a majority of use cases.

We might still want to keep JulianDate internally but should make sure we can convert to/from Temporal as it stabilizes