Description
I will start with the proposal as a TL;DR before explaining the motivations behind it:
Proposal
It would be quite convenient if we could have the encoding/json package understand the format of time.Time as part of the struct definition. Something like this:
type User struct {
Name string
JoinDate time.Time `time:"2006-01-02"`
}This means that when you write json.Unmarshal(data, &user), the json package will understand what format to parse/serialize the field with.
Motivation/Experience Report
Currently, there are three workarounds:
-
type MyTime time.Time: https://goplay.space/#APZL4Rzlm_ -
Embedding time.Time in MyTime type: https://goplay.space/#q-oKnSTtQV
-
Implementing
json.Unmarshalleron the parent struct: https://goplay.space/#mzb8MQfajl
Those workarounds are not bad. However, I've noticed that they get out of hand once your codebase starts to scale.
Imagine having hundreds of structs with hundreds of fields where many of them could have different Time types just because they have different serialization formats, and nothing else.
The time.Time package, I think, might be too opinionated to assume RFC3339 is the only acceptable format in the json.Unmarshaller interface:
Line 1366 in ce10e9d
I think it makes sense for it to be a default serialization format, but not the only one. The workaround is initially not bad at all. However, it gets cumbersome when your project scales.
I think this proposal shows that the above solution can make our code more declarative and less cumbersome. This echo's Rob Pike's talk in that here we can hide complexity behind a simple interface.
Lastly, this doesn't make or break my Go experience, but I personally see room for enhancement here.