Issue #672: std::time has no calendar time: no “now”, no date, no formatting

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decision · opened 2026-10-18 · updated 2026-10-18 · 0 comments

What is missing

std::time has sleep and a monotonic Instant (crates/nikaia-std/src/time.rs). There is no wall-clock time, no date, no format. A program cannot print “2026-10-18 20:04 UTC”.

Where it came from

scripts/site-issues.py writes the time it read the issues (datetime.now(timezone.utc).strftime(...)); the Nikaia prototype had to leave that line out. build_time.rs exists for build-time values only.

Question for the owner

Does std::time get a calendar clock (now_utc()), and does it stop at UTC plus formatting, or go to time zones? Note the effect: a program that reads the wall clock is no longer reproducible (see how build_time is handled).

To build (once decided)

1. ADR + specification text (effects: reading the clock).
2. std::time::now_utc() -> Timestamp, Timestamp.format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M UTC"), parse of ISO 8601 (GitHub’s created_at).
3. Tests with a fixed clock.

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