Duration.MAX_VALUE

[Stephen Colebourne]

Hmm, yes. Not sure why that didn't get added in Java 8!
The constants would be MAX/MIN as per classes like Instant.
Stephen


On Wed, 3 Sept 2025 at 12:50, Pavel Rappo <pavel.rappo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Couldn't recall or quickly find if this was asked before.
>
> I come across this quite often: there doesn’t seem to be a readily
> available maximum value for java.time.Duration -- a value that
> represents the longest possible duration.
>
> I assume there are plenty of homegrown constants out in the wild
> addressing this. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not hard to create one. The
> issue, in my experience, is that it takes time and sometimes
> experimentation.
>
> Unless one reads the Javadoc carefully, it’s not obvious that the
> maximum duration can be constructed as follows:
>
>     Duration.of(Long.MAX_VALUE, 999_999_999);
>
> Naturally, one might first try using IDE autocomplete. For example,
> creating a Duration from Long.MAX_VALUE of a large unit -- millennia,
> centuries, decades, etc. -- only to run into ArithmeticException. Only
> when reaching seconds does it finally work:
>
>     Duration.ofSeconds(Long.MAX_VALUE);
>
> or
>
>     Duration.of(Long.MAX_VALUE, ChronoUnit.SECONDS);
>
> Of course, there’s no practical difference between
> Duration.of(Long.MAX_VALUE, 999_999_999) and
> Duration.ofSeconds(Long.MAX_VALUE). We’re talking about durations on
> the order of 292 billion years, after all. The exact value isn’t the
> problem. The problem is that the values are inconsistent, and arriving
> to them is error-prone. Adding a constant to java.time.Duration would
> simplify things.
>
> -Pavel