Temporal: The Curious Incident of the Wrong Nighttime

Temporal is a proposal to add modern date and time handling capabilities directly into JavaScript, rather than relying on external libraries or packages. It aims to improve the standardization and functionality of date and time operations in the language.

Temporal was created to address the pitfalls and limitations of the old JavaScript date object, such as issues with time zones and zero-based months, and to provide a more reliable and intuitive way to handle date and time in JavaScript.

Temporal provides a more robust handling of time zones by allowing developers to work with exact moments in time and wall time independently of time zones. This prevents common errors associated with time zone conversions in the old Date object.

Temporal includes types such as Instant, PlainDate, PlainTime, PlainYearMonth, PlainMonthDay, ZonedDateTime, and Duration, each designed to handle different aspects of date and time with specific purposes and limitations.

As of now, Temporal is available in Firefox. Safari has partial support behind a flag in tech preview, and there are ongoing efforts to implement it in Chrome and Node.js.

Yes, while Temporal aims to replace the old Date object and reduce the need for external libraries, existing libraries like Moment.js and Date.fns can still coexist and may offer additional functionalities over Temporal.

The immutability of Temporal objects ensures that they cannot be accidentally modified by functions or libraries, providing more certainty and preventing unintended side effects in date and time manipulations.

Igalia is involved in the standardization process of Temporal as part of its collaboration with other companies, helping to improve the state of the web platform through open standards.

Yes, there are polyfills available for Temporal, such as those from Full Calendar and js-Temporal, which allow developers to use Temporal features in environments where it is not natively supported yet.

Temporal has strong support for internationalization, allowing developers to handle date and time operations in a way that respects different locales and time zone requirements, reducing errors and improving user experience globally.