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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Time::Tiny 0.01 released. 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Can you give a bit more info as to what use these two modules are? Looking at the source, all they do is store year/month/day/hour/min/sec and give one shortcut for printing those out.

    The docs make the excuse that loading time modules takes 3-4MB (only true for DateTime - try something lighter like Date::Class or Time::Piece), but for *::Tiny to do anything useful it looks like you'd have to do that anyway.

    I (for obvious reasons) totally disagree with the flamebait in your docs about how DateTime.pm is the

    • Re:Why? (Score:1)

      by Alias (5735) on 2006.09.04 17:11 (#49786) Homepage Journal
      I recently worked on an soft-realtime Perl application (using POE) that dealt heavily with dates and times. Not manipulating them, but they had to be parsed and potentially converted between formats.

      What I found was that quite a significant amount of work was having to be done just to create the DateTime objects, far more than I was comfortable with.

      And yet the data did not require that level of rigour, I wasn't going to be doing anything with the dates, just holding them in memory, possibly converting to a different format, and possible dumping them back out later in the same of a different format.

      What I needed was an extremely light, very quick to parse, implementation of a simple data object for date/time/datetime that I could use when speed and lightness were essential.

      But having something like that disconnected from DateTime entirely made things difficult for the two places I needed full DateTime logic, and compromised the concept.

      Hence the light implementation, with a optional converter to a DateTime object.

      I would expect these modules to be used in those scenarios, time-critical or speed-important applications, where no significant manipulation needs to be done, but you still want a sane object form for a date/time/datetime.

      As for DateTime being the only module to get it "right", perhaps the term "comprehensive" is better. I've hit various limitations with various date and time modules over the years (and I've written one of my own, a fork of Time::Piece under a previous name) and I never felt they were comprehensive enough to be the One True Solution.

      And after doing a lot of date and time work, I've eventually reached the opinion that DateTime is the Right approach to the problem.
      • Further, I should note that DateTime is also cross-platform and works on Win32 :)

        *hint*
      • I agree with the comprehensive thing. Perhaps better wording is required in your module docs :-)

        I guess I'm lucky enough to have never really needed that much comprehensiveness. 4MB just to load one damn perl module (never mind the hassle of installing the thing) is just asking too much.
        • Well, I've never had a problem installing DateTime, it's been just fine.

          The only problem was on Windows, and the DateTime guys have fixed that now.

          But yes, it is expensive. Which is why the Tiny modules exist.

          And while I have your attention, any chance of getting some small releases of the modules you have commit on (that I mentioned a few posts ago).

          The bugs are tiny things, but it would help us out a LOT to have some of your high profile modules working on Windows.
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