Overview

Being heavily inspired by the java.time library, Island Time should look fairly familiar to those acquainted with it and tends to follow many of the same design principles.

General Design

Immutability

All date-time primitives are immutable and thread-safe. Operations that manipulate a date, time, duration, or interval will always return a new object.

Precision

Island Time uses integer rather than floating-point values, offering a fixed nanosecond precision across the entire supported time scale. This avoids any surprises that might emerge from the use of floating-point arithmetic and the reduction in precision that occurs when representing larger durations.

Overflow Handling

When working with dates and times, overflow is almost never a behavior that you want. See Y2k or Time formatting and storage bugs. Island Time uses checked arithmetic throughout to detect overflow and throw exceptions rather than failing silently.

Type-Safety

In general, Island Time tries to prevent nonsensical operations at compile time rather than runtime. To that end, you'll find that there are a lot more classes than there are in a number of other date-time libraries.