3 ms·

"Make two parallel time systems and allow conversion between one and the other programmatically" reduces spiritedly and unambiguously to "use one time system an

• zozbot234 4y ago
  But the whole point of the OP is that UTC has leap seconds, which are hard to manage programmatically - and may even be impossible, wrt. future dates and times. That's literally the one relevant difference between UTC and TAI.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no need for UTC to continue inserting leap seconds. When they commit to stopping, everybody can relax: irritation removed. Telling people to use TAI is telling them to have a different time from everybody else. The whole point of civil time is specifically that other people use it. Using TAI does not free anybody, because anytime you need to interact with outside, you are back in the nightmare.
    • nullc 4y ago
      Exactly. Discontinuing leap seconds is a 99.999999% compatible change. I've tried to build systems using TAI they break down because: At some point you have to interact with something that doesn't use TAI and that fully reintroduces all the leap second issues, and because a lot of third party software has leap second handling, so the wheels fall off when you update some component and its embedded list of historical leapseconds now changes its behavior. Similarly, sometimes UTC time is all that's available and without the leap second data you can't back them out to get TAI. And with leapsmear the challenges of backing out to TAI have increase substantially.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Then there are the peer systems that claim to be UTC, but get it wrong. But you have to interact with them anyway.