Does anyone know why burntsushi is making this new library? I haven't messed around with times in rust much, but do the existing libraries have performance problems? Or are the existing API's awkward to use? Or is he just doing it for fun, or some other reason?
In Java they had the same problem. The Java standard library implementation wasn't great, Jodatime came along to address those issues. Java 8 then introduced a new DateTime API that was heavily influenced by Jodatime with the benefit that as it is in the standard library, it can be more heavily adopted by library-writers.
There's an additional related stepping stone here (as it is name dropped in the library's design document as well) in that TC-39 has been hard at work on a proposal to standardize similar APIs into EcmaScript (JS) called Temporal: https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/
Temporal benefits from the JodaTime/Java 8+ date work, but also includes more recent IETF and IANA standards as other influences.
Does anyone know why burntsushi is making this new library? I haven't messed around with times in rust much, but do the existing libraries have performance problems? Or are the existing API's awkward to use? Or is he just doing it for fun, or some other reason?