Comment by jayflux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayflux | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This was an intentional design decision. We wanted to make sure all the temporal types could be serialize/deserializable, but as you mentioned, you couldn't implicitly go back to the object you started with as JSON.parse doesn't support that.

Instead the onus is on the developer to re-create the correct object they need on the other side. I don't believe this is problematic because if you know you're sending a Date, DateTime, MonthDay, YearMonth type from one side, then you know what type to rebuild from the ISO string on the other. Having it be automatic could be an issue if you receive unexpected values and are now dealing with the wrong types.

There is an example here in the docs of a reviver being used for Temporal.Instant https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/instant.html#toJSON

So it's intentional to make people pass down raw strings versus making the communication safe(er) by default?

There are no date, time or datetime types in JSON, so you'll have to serialise it to a string or an int anyway, and then when deserialising you'll need to identify explicitly which values should be parsed as dates.

Well, you could still have a compound object in JSON, that is output by the Temporal API, and which given as input is guaranteed to result in an equal object it was created/serialized from. This compound object must contain all required infos about timezones and such stuff.

.... we're talking about serialization here. "convert to a raw string" is sort of the name of the game.

It's a string in a well specified string format. That's typically what you want for serialization.

Temporal is typed; but its serialization helpers aren't, because there's no single way to talk about types across serialization. That's functionality a serialization library may choose to provide, but can't really be designed into the language.

You realize that JSON isn't just for JavaScript to JavaScript communication, right? Even if you had a magical format (which doesn't make sense and is a bad idea to attempt to auto-deserialize), it wouldn't work across languages.

If you really want that, it's not very hard to design a pair of functions `mySerialize()`, `myDeserialize()` that's a thin wrapper over `JSON.parse`.

its gotta become bytes somehow

Reply on news.ycombinator.com