[amluto]

No, I agree they did a bunch of good engineering for internal use.

But they didn't keep it internal properly -- the real world has leap seconds for better or for worse, and this library really does stick its head in the sand and pretend they don't exist. Google specifically says that this library is designed to be "the foundation of Google's new API platform". Yet they give a data type (as a headline feature) and a sample usage that is simply incorrect if you don't set your system to work using Google's "leap smear". It also seems quite likely that it'll result in blatantly wrong human-readable strings. I'll even quote a string from timestamp.proto [1]:

9999-12-31T23:59:59Z

That looks like an RFC 3339 string, and it even has the 'Z' suffix, which means it's UTC, which has an agreed-upon international definition. But this is not a valid UTC time. It's a time in a different time zone that Google made up.

Google easily could have done better: publish a spec for a different kind of time like:

9999-12-31T23:59:59s

where the little 's' means 'smeared'. Supply a serializer and deserializer for that. Now there's no ambiguity.

[1] https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/pr...