I'm wanting to write a program to store various events across all of history, from the big bang until the heat death of the universe.
Is there a standard way of representing this range of time? Most datetime libraries struggle with dates more than 5000 years in the future/past, so I don't think any existing libraries will work, except maybe as a default for "close enough" datetimes.
I'm happy if it's not exact, and if I can avoid it I won't consider the different calendars. Especially for events that occurred millions of years ago, I don't need millisecond precision.
I'll be writing this in Rust, but the implementation shouldn't change too much from one language to the next.
My first thought would be to wrap a datetime library with my own struct that defines some 64-bit integers for the greater time ranges:
struct BigTime {
datetime: <library's datetime object>,
millions_of_years: i64,
trillions_of_years: i64,
}
Is there a "neater" way of doing this?