> but the datetime APIs refuse to expose leap-second info because they're too committed to "only UTC is in-scope for this project".

This doesn't make sense on at least two different levels.

First, pedantically, the definition of UTC as a time scale is that it includes leap seconds. So if you're committed to UTC, then you're supporting leap seconds.

Second, and to more broadly address your point, you should say, "they're too committed to 'only the POSIX time scale is in-scope for this project.'" That more accurately captures the status quo and also intimates the problem: aside from specialty applications, basically everything is built on POSIX time, which specifically ignores the existence of leap seconds.

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LegionMammal978 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but my gripe isn't even that we ought to change the "POSIX time by default" status quo (the ship has long sailed that everyone counts durations by 'calendar seconds'), it's that the underlying libraries don't even provide enough information for "specialty applications" to reliably correct for it, short of perpetually updating it themselves.

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burntsushi 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Why 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]

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff/issues/7

	▲	kortilla 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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”.
	▲	LegionMammal978 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> (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.