dt — Go’s missing datetime package

Go’s standard library contains a single date package — time. The type provided by it, Time, contains date, time and location information. More often than not we don’t need location info, or we need to represent date/time only. dt provides exactly that, a time-zone-independent representation of time that follows the rules of the proleptic Gregorian calendar with exactly 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, and 60-second minutes.

Repo available at: https://github.com/ribice/dt

Most, if not all of the applications being built require some info about time. Whether it’s timestamp of object creation/update, user’s birthdate or some schedules.

Go’s time package represents a unique point in time, a timestamp. But a birthday doesn’t need to be represented by a timestamp, a simple date is enough. And same goes for many other usages.

Prior to dt, I would use Go’s time package and then strip date or time info depending on my needs. I realized that’s not the best way, thus I built dt.

dt provides a time-zone-independent representation of time that follows the rules of the proleptic Gregorian calendar with exactly 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, and 60-second minutes.

What is provided?

dt provides three types to work with:

• Time: Contains time info: HH:mm
• Date: Contains date info: YYYY-MM-DD
• DateTime: Contains date and time information: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm

Unlike time.Time these types contain an additional Valid field representing whether the data inside it was scanned/marshaled. This prevents situations like saving default date in a database when nothing was received or responding via JSON with default date even though the date was empty.

Types provided in dt represent sql types time, date and timestamp.