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Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

I find it curious that serialization formats like JSON get hit on for not having a native date/time format. Just use a UNIX timestamp and be done with it.

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https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7493 says to use an ISO 8601/RFC 3339 timestamp, uppercase, with timezone, with seconds. IOW, Javascript's toISOString() or equivalent.

You need to parse that. For graphs with thousands of data points just use Unix time plus a timezone or use the browser's timezone. ISO 8601 would leave your graphs churning for seconds.

If parse time is a significant concern, why are you using JSON?

Because we feed the data to Js. No need for additional overhead parsing string based timestamps. Unix epoch is just an int. We don't need pre 1970 timestamps.

Pre-1970 timestamps work too:

  Welcome to Node.js v12.18.4.
  Type ".help" for more information.
  > new Date(-10000)
  1969-12-31T23:59:50.000Z

JavaScript can parse binary serialised protobufs.

Yup with external libs. JSON.parse is builtin. We do the renderin in browser so why bother with protobuf.

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