<div dir="ltr">Duration.MIN is a whole 'nother bag of worms, because Durations are signed (they can be positive or negative...or zero). Internally we also have Durations.MIN, but it's not public ... and along with it, I left myself a helpful note about naming:<div><br></div><div> /** The minimum supported {@code Duration}, approximately -292 billion years. */<br> // Note: before making this constant public, consider that "MIN" might not be a great name (not<br> // everyone knows that Durations can be negative!).<br> static final Duration MIN = Duration.ofSeconds(Long.MIN_VALUE);</div><div><br></div><div>This reminds me of Double.MIN_VALUE (which is the smallest _positive_ double value) --- we've seen Double.MIN_VALUE misused so much that we introduced Doubles.MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE as a more descriptive alias. A large percent of Double.MIN_VALUE users actually want the smallest possible negative value, aka -Double.MAX_VALUE.</div><div><br></div><div>If we introduce Duration.MIN, I hope it would not be Duration.ofNanos(1), but rather Duration.ofSeconds(Long.MIN_VALUE).</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 7:59 PM ecki <<a href="mailto:ecki@zusammenkunft.net">ecki@zusammenkunft.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div>If you ask me, I don’t find it very useful, It won’t work for arithmetrics, even the APIs would have a hard time using it (how do you express the deadline) and APIs with a timeout parameter do have a good reason for it, better pick “possible” values for better self healing and unstuck of systems. In fact I would err on the smaller side in combination with expecting spurious wakeups. </div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_MSFontService,-apple-system,Roboto,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt">BTW, when you introduce MIN as well, maybe also think about min precision, min delta or such. Will it always be 1 nano?</div><div id="m_4262163696471033019ms-outlook-mobile-body-separator-line" style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_MSFontService,-apple-system,Roboto,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt" dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_MSFontService,-apple-system,Roboto,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><br></div></div><div style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_MSFontService,-apple-system,Roboto,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt" id="m_4262163696471033019ms-outlook-mobile-signature"><span style="font-family:Aptos;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Gruß,</span><div dir="ltr" style="text-align:left;text-indent:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Aptos;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Bernd</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align:left;text-indent:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Aptos;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)">-- </div><div style="font-family:Aptos;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><a href="https://bernd.eckenfels.net" target="_blank">https://bernd.eckenfels.net</a></span></div></div><div id="m_4262163696471033019mail-editor-reference-message-container"><hr style="display:inline-block;width:98%"><div id="m_4262163696471033019divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Von:</b> core-libs-dev <<a href="mailto:core-libs-dev-retn@openjdk.org" target="_blank">core-libs-dev-retn@openjdk.org</a>> im Auftrag von Pavel Rappo <<a href="mailto:pavel.rappo@gmail.com" target="_blank">pavel.rappo@gmail.com</a>><br><b>Gesendet:</b> Donnerstag, September 4, 2025 12:41 AM<br><b>An:</b> Kurt Alfred Kluever <<a href="mailto:kak@google.com" target="_blank">kak@google.com</a>><br><b>Cc:</b> Stephen Colebourne <<a href="mailto:scolebourne@joda.org" target="_blank">scolebourne@joda.org</a>>; core-libs-dev <<a href="mailto:core-libs-dev@openjdk.org" target="_blank">core-libs-dev@openjdk.org</a>><br><b>Betreff:</b> Re: Duration.MAX_VALUE</span><div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> </div></div>This is useful; thanks. It would be good to see more of your data.
<br>
<br>My use case is also duration which practically means **forever**. I
<br>pass it to methods that accept timeouts, and expect these methods to
<br>correctly interpret it.
<br>
<br>One example of a practical interpretation is
<br>java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit.convert(Duration). This method never
<br>overflows; instead, it caps at Long.MAX_VALUE nanoseconds, which is
<br>roughly 292 years.
<br>
<br>Would I be okay, if the proposed duration didn't reflect **forever**
<br>but instead reflected **long enough**? I think so. But it still
<br>somehow feels wrong to make it less than maximum representable value.
<br>
<br>Personally, I'm not interested in calendar arithmetic, that is, in
<br>adding or subtracting durations. Others might be, and that's okay and
<br>needs to be factored in. For better or worse, java.time made a choice
<br>to be unforgiving in regard to overflow and is very upfront about it.
<br>It's not only proposed Duration.MAX. The same thing happens if you try
<br>this
<br>
<br>Instant.MAX.toEpochMilli()
<br>
<br>I guess my point is that doing calendar arithmetic on an unknown value
<br>is probably wrong. Doing it on a known huge/edge-case value is surely
<br>wrong. So back to your data. I would be interested to see what
<br>triggers overflows for your Durations.MAX.
<br>
<br>On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 8:45 PM Kurt Alfred Kluever <<a href="mailto:kak@google.com" target="_blank">kak@google.com</a>> wrote:
<br>>
<br>> Hi all,
<br>>
<br>> Internally at Google, we've had a Durations.MAX constant exposed for the past 7 years. It now has about 700 usages across our depot, which I can try to categorize (at a future date).
<br>>
<br>> While I haven't performed that analysis yet, I think exposing this constant was a bit of a mistake. People seem to want to use MAX to mean "forever" (often in regards to an RPC deadline). This works fine as long as every single layer that touches the deadline is very careful about overflow. The only reasonable thing you can do with MAX is compareTo() and equals(). Attempting to do any simple math operation (e.g., now+deadline) is going to explode. Additionally, decomposing Duration.MAX explodes for any sub-second precision (e.g., toMillis()).
<br>>
<br>> As we dug into this, another proposal came up which was something like Durations.VERY_LONG. This duration would be longer than any reasonable finite duration but not long enough to cause an overflow when added to any reasonable time. E.g., a million years would probably satisfy both criteria. This would mean math operations and decompositions won't explode (well, microseconds and nanoseconds still would), and it could safely be used as a relative timeout.
<br>>
<br>> As I mentioned above, I'd be happy to try to categorize a sample of our 700 existing usages if folks think that would be useful for this proposal.
<br>>
<br>> Thanks,
<br>>
<br>> -Kurt Alfred Kluever (on behalf of Google's Java and Kotlin Ecosystem team)
<br>>
<br>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 1:53 PM Pavel Rappo <<a href="mailto:pavel.rappo@gmail.com" target="_blank">pavel.rappo@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
<br>>>
<br>>> If I understood you correctly, you think we should also add
<br>>> Duration.MIN. If so, what use case do you envision for it? Or we add
<br>>> if purely for symmetry with Instant?
<br>>>
<br>>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 6:43 PM Pavel Rappo <<a href="mailto:pavel.rappo@gmail.com" target="_blank">pavel.rappo@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
<br>>> >
<br>>> > On Wed, Sep 3, 2025 at 6:06 PM Stephen Colebourne <<a href="mailto:scolebourne@joda.org" target="_blank">scolebourne@joda.org</a>> wrote:
<br>>> > >
<br>>> > > Hmm, yes. Not sure why that didn't get added in Java 8!
<br>>> > > The constants would be MAX/MIN as per classes like Instant.
<br>>> > > Stephen
<br>>> >
<br>>> > I thought that naming could be tricky :) The public constant
<br>>> > Duration.ZERO and the public method isZero() are already there.
<br>>> > However, it does not preclude us from naming a new constant MAX.
<br>>
<br>>
<br>>
<br>> --
<br>> kak
<br>
<br></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><font face="sans-serif"><span style="line-height:19px">kak</span></font></div>