It will overflow at System.out.println(new Date(Long.MAX_VALUE)); which prints Sun Aug 17 03:12:55 GMT-04:00 292278994 That’s thus after a bit more than 292 million years. I’d say, there’s a plenty of time to invent a solution in the meanwhile. To be honest, I don’t expect the humanhood to survive this. We exist only a few seconds … Read more
The limit is imposed by the 4 byte signed integers that most C libraries use for representing that count. Quick math (assumes 365 day years, not exactly correct): 2147483648 seconds ~ 68.1 years This also implies a lower limit of ~1900. Some libraries have started to introduce 64 bit epoch counts, but they are few … Read more
I have written portable replacement for time.h (currently just localtime(), gmtime(), mktime() and timegm()) which uses 64 bit time even on 32 bit machines. It is intended to be dropped into C projects as a replacement for time.h. It is being used in Perl and I intend to fix Ruby and Python’s 2038 problems with … Read more
You can alternatively use the DateTime class, which internally represents the time components independently. Thus it is not susceptible to the 2038 limitation (unless you use ::getTimestamp).
I have marked this as a community wiki so feel free to edit at your leisure. What exactly is the Year 2038 problem? “The year 2038 problem (also known as Unix Millennium Bug, Y2K38 by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem … Read more