hi dave and all :) so, we're starting to implement new date/time handling here at the office. the DateTime suite seemed the natural way to go for obvious reasons (it didn't exist or was relatively new the last few cycles, should you ask). however, in implementing it we found something that might prevent us from being able to deploy it at all - DateTime objects are _huge_ for non-UTC timezones. consider:
use DateTime; use Data::Dumper; $dt = DateTime->now; print Dumper $dt; sleep 5; $dt->set_time_zone('Europe/London'); # UTC equivalent print Dumper $dt; now, because we have a ton of different things that need to be individually wrapped in objects, this means a megaton of data will be floating around our model objects, and even more floating around in our object caches. so, the question I have is whether all that data is necessary to store in the object upon creation? that is, is it all precalculations such that we can trade in object size for runtime efficiency? perhaps not in the code as it exists now, but is that something DateTime is open to, or is that data more essential to the object than I realize? --Geoff
