binary protocol time representation

[Dan Farina]

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 14:11 +0200, Antonello Provenzano wrote:
> I can't speak for other environments, but converting a .NET "tick"
> representation of dates into UNIX epoch time is quite easy and
> requires just 2 lines of code.

It may cost two lines, but costs similarly much to use the "N seconds in
the future" representation. I suggest we just use that one and ditch
UNIX epoch time for two reasons:

1) Protocol aesthetics
2) Evade timezone woes

> the main problem with the binary protocol could be another one
> instead: you should mainly focus on bytes alignment, which under .NET
> is quite different from Java or C.
> To interoperate with systems that are not running under .NET (or COM
> using Interop) many times I need to represent bytes by using integers
> and in many cases the conversion from byte buffers to integers is not
> correct (.NET uses integers at 4, 8, 16 bytes) and the result corrupts
> the whole system.

This I don't understand. Do you mean issues of reading stuff off the
wire and getting strange numbers out of byte buffers? Perhaps endian
problems? Or something more sinister?

df