Instant

One moment for everyone, written 2026-10-25T09:30:00Z.

Time and calendar; ordered; since Jadpo 0.1.0.

Make one

text.parse(raw, as: Instant) reads one from its text; text that isn't one at all fails malformed, such as 2026-10-25, 2026-10-25T09:30:00 or yesterday.

This operation gives one: temporal.instant.

Text, JSON and storage

text.from writes its canonical text, the one form text.parse reads back. JSON sends its canonical text as a string.

It is stored in one column named for the field, of type timestamptz(3). 2026-10-25T09:30:00.250Z is stored as '2026-10-25 09:30:00.250000+00'::timestamptz.

Shown to people

text.format(value, locale:) shows it to people in their locale. A call also gives zone: and format:.

With locale: Locale.en_gb, zone: Zone.europe_london and format: TimeFormat.date_time_medium:

Operations

• temporal.between(start: Instant, end: Instant) -> Duration: How long from start to end: end - start.
• temporal.format_relative(value: T, now: Instant, zone: Zone?, locale: Locale) -> PresentationText: value shown to a person in locale as how long ago it was from now: "just now", minutes, "Today at", "Yesterday at", the weekday, then the long date.
• temporal.in_zone(instant: Instant, zone: Zone) -> ZonedTime: instant as the local time in zone.
• temporal.instant(value: ZonedTime) -> Instant: The instant a local time is.
• temporal.occurrences(rule: RecurrenceRule, from: T, count: Int) -> List<ZonedTime>: The next count occurrences of rule at or after from, in its zone (RFC 5545): fewer when the rule ends first; count is from 1 to 1000, so an unbounded rule is never expanded without a bound. From a date, the days they fall on, List<CalendarDate>, which a rule on dates gives; from an Instant, a timed rule's local times.
• temporal.open_at(hours: OpeningHours, at: Instant) -> Bool: Whether hours are open at at, by the clock in their zone.

Like every standard type, it also has the contract's own operations: text.parse, text.from, text.format, json.read, json.write and ==. It is ordered, so < and sorting take it. Every standard type meets one contract says how they work.