Proposal for custom time string formatting in std.datetime

[Walter Bright]

On 12/22/2011 3:03 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, December 22, 2011 02:12:31 Walter Bright wrote:
>> Timezone information is not necessary to measure elapsed time or relative
>> time, for example.
>
> The type requires it though. No, comparison doesn't require the time zone, but
> many (most?) of the other operations do. And the type can't be separated from
> the time zone. That's part of the whole point of how SysTime is designed. It
> holds its time internally in UTC and then uses the time zone to adjust the
> time whenever a property or other function is used which requires the time in
> that time zone. That way, you avoid all of the issues and bugs that result
> from converting the time. The cost of that is that you can't not have a time
> zone and use SysTime. So, if someone cares about saving that little bit of
> extra size in their executable by not using the time zone, they're going to
> have to use the C functions or design their own time code.

The time zone info can be lazily initialized only by those operations that need 
a time zone.