TinyTime

Tiny Timestamps That Last Forever.

TinyTime lets you choose how precise you want your timestamp to be, enabling shorter TinyTime stamps to be used when length/size is a concern. With TinyTime you can use a 32bit integer timestamp saving 50% of length compared to standard Unix timestamp. This can be achieved through storing minutes rather than seconds, or hours instead of minutes, days instead of hours etc. Even though the timestamps are smaller they will still last for thousands of years, something a Unix timestamp will not in a 32bit integer.

The Problem This Solves

Communicating a unix timestamp in readable ASCII requires 16 bytes (in HEX), something which can make stateless tokens, urls or other usages too large, bloating and wasting characters. With TinyTime that same time stamp can be reduced to only 4 bytes by storing the hour. In most cases down to the second precision is unnecessary. For example, a user token expiration; we only need to know at X hour it expires, the exact second is unimportant.

When storing TinyTime as bytes the smallest timestamp can be 2 bytes or 3 bytes if stored as base64.

Install Now

Theres no TinyTime like the present.

go get github.com/go-compile/tinytime

Example

More examples can be found in the examples folder.

package main

import (
	"encoding/hex"
	"fmt"

	"github.com/go-compile/tinytime"
)

func main() {
	d := tinytime.Now().Days()

	// store in as small format as possible as HEX
	fmt.Println("Smallest Possible:", tinytime.ToBytes(d))
	fmt.Println("Smallest Possible (Hex):", hex.EncodeToString(tinytime.ToBytes(d)))
}