Time is a construct but it can still break your software
From The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast
May 1, 2026 · 36 min · Episode 943
About this episode
Ryan discusses date and time handling in JavaScript with Jason Williams, focusing on the challenges and the Temporal proposal.
Ryan welcomes Jason Williams, senior software engineer at Bloomberg and the creator of Rust-based JavaScript engine Boa, to the show to dive into why date and time handling in JavaScript is so difficult and how the Temporal proposal aims to fix it. They explore the current flaws and issues in JavaScript that make the Date object so hard to work with, how libraries like Moment.js helped but eventually became too complex themselves, and why the Temporal proposal took nine years to complete. Episode notes: Temporal is a new TC39 proposed standard for JavaScript that replaces the Date object. It operates as a top-level namespace and brings a modern date/time API to the ECMAScript language. Connect with Jason on Bluesky or at his website . Congrats to Great Answer badge winner BrenBarn , who won the badge for their answer to rethrowing python exception. Which to catch? . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
People in this episode
Host: Ryan
Guest: Jason Williams
Topics covered
- JavaScript
- date handling
- Temporal proposal
- software engineering
- programming libraries
Keywords
- JavaScript
- Temporal
- date handling
- Moment.js
- software engineering
- ECMAScript
- programming
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Bloomberg, TC39, ECMAScript
Products: Rust-based JavaScript engine Boa, Moment.js
Books & works: Temporal proposal, Date object
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