Or unless you use more precise clocks. Nanosecond resolution cuts those billions down to hundreds of years. We're probably gonna get picosecond or femtosecond resolution clocks someday. Then we're gonna have yet another one of these threads and someone's gonna tell me 128 bits will fix it forever.
Those are already different types, though. What type it makes sense to use for seconds isn’t necessarily the same as what type it makes sense to use for other time units. I agree that using 128 bits makes sense for nanoseconds if for some reason you care about nanosecond-precision timestamps merely hundreds of years in the future or past.
I find it hard to believe we will ever have femtoseconds-resolution timers or ever even care what femtosecond an event happened at. But even if we do, incidentally, 128 bits is still fine. i128 femtoseconds will overflow in approximately the year 1000000000000000000000000.
So, I don’t think there’s any practically useful time unit for which we need variable length integers and can’t just use i128.
> I find it hard to believe we will ever [...] care what femtosecond an event happened at
GNSS satellites require precise clocks to accurately calculate ranges. Signals travel at the speed of light so small imprecisions result in large errors: timing differences of one millisecond produce about 300 kilometers of error in distance measurements. It seems GPS satellites have clocks accurate to within 40 nanoseconds. One nanosecond gives around 30 cm of error, 40 nanoseconds would give about 12 meters.
Picosecond resolution would bring those errors down to the millimeter and micrometer ranges. Femtosecond resolution would bring the errors down to nanometers.
Okay, fair enough. But i128 is still plenty for femtoseconds.
Keep in mind that going from 64 to 128 bits squares the available range. The number of femtoseconds is merely a million times the number of nanoseconds, whereas the number of numbers representable by an i128 is 2^64 times the number representable by an i64.
> Picosecond resolution would bring those errors down to the millimeter and micrometer ranges. Femtosecond resolution would bring the errors down to nanometers.
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