Time is a construct but it can still break your software

Source: Stack Overflow Blog

Overview

May 1, 2026

Ryan welcomes Jason Williams, senior software engineer at Bloomberg and the creator of the Rust‑based JavaScript engine Boa, to discuss why date and time handling in JavaScript is so difficult and how the Temporal proposal aims to fix it.

Topics Covered

• The current flaws and issues in JavaScript that make the Date object hard to work with.
• How libraries like Moment.js helped but eventually became too complex themselves.
• Why the Temporal proposal took nine years to complete.

Temporal Proposal

Temporal is a new TC39‑proposed standard for JavaScript that replaces the Date object. It operates as a top‑level namespace and brings a modern date/time API to the ECMAScript language.

Connect with Jason

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jason-williams.co.uk
• Personal website: https://jason-williams.co.uk/

Acknowledgements

Congrats to Great Answer badge winner BrenBarn, who earned the badge for their answer to “rethrowing python exception. Which to catch?”.