"Time zones are logical and easy to use."
—no one ever
Programming with time zones is notoriously difficult and error prone. Sure, this is partially because time zones have some inherent complexity. But perhaps the bigger problem is that programmers don't have a clear conceptual model of how time and time zones work. Additionally, library support may not be what it should. The end result is that code dealing with time zones is often overly complicated and sometimes even wrong.
A couple years ago we set out to fix these time zone programming woes within Google. We did this first by defining a greatly simplified mental model that enables programmers to understand time concepts and correctly reason about their code. We also created a C++ Time Zone library that closely matches this mental model and allows programmers to handle even the most complicated issues in a general and clear way.
And since we don't believe that time zone programming problems are unique to Google, we think our solutions may be useful to others. We presented these ideas and announced the open sourced cctz library this week at CppCon 2015. Even if you don't use C++, we hope you'll take a moment to read about the simplified mental model and perhaps flip through the slides from our talk, because those ideas are language independent.
by Greg Miller and Bradley White, Google Engineering
