Comment by kortilla
2 days ago
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”.
"niche" doesn't mean "unimportant." It just means "uncommon." It's a relative term.
The vast vast majority of people using general purpose datetime libraries are not in need of GPS handling or high precision scientific calculations.
The vast majority of people using date time libraries don’t need to represent dates before 1980 or dates after 2036. It doesn’t mean you just bury your head in the sand and ignore a pretty critical part of how time representation works.