alt Hacker NewsWhy should they though? To me it seems like a niche of a niche. I think there is plenty of room for scientific datetime libraries to service this need in a way that is likely better than what a general purpose datetime library would provide. (And indeed, there are many of them.)
I say this as someone who had leap second support working in a pre-release version of Jiff[1] (including reading from leapsecond tzdb data) but ripped it out for reasons.[2]
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> (including reading from leapsecond tzdb data)
That's part of it: If I were writing a standalone program that could extract info from tzdb or whatever, I'd happily jump through those hoops, and not bother anyone else's libraries. I don't really care about the ergonomics. But for JS scripts in particular, there is no information available that is not provided by either the browser APIs or someone's server. And such servers are not in great supply.
It’s not “niche” if you do things synchronized to GPS timestamps. (i.e. a significant portion of telecom, a bunch of electrical grid stuff, etc).
Anything using GPS as lock references to synchronize stuff that needs to be aligned to the millisecond absolutely cannot tolerate stuff like “the leap second smear”.