issues: 1413075015

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
1413075015 I_kwDOAMm_X85UOdBH 7184 Potentially add option to encode times using `longdouble` values 6628425 open 0     0 2022-10-18T11:46:30Z 2022-10-18T11:47:00Z   MEMBER      

By default xarray will exactly roundtrip times saved to disk by encoding them using int64 values. However, if a user specifies time encoding units that prevent this, float64 values will be used, and this has the potential to cause roundtripping differences due to roundoff error. Recently, cftime added the ability to encode times using longdouble values (https://github.com/Unidata/cftime/pull/284). On some platforms this offers greater precision than float64 values (though typically not full quad precision). Nevertheless some users might be interested in encoding their times using such values.

The main thing that longdouble values have going for them is that they enable greater precision when using arbitrary units to encode the dates (with int64 we are constrained to using units that allow for time intervals to be expressed with integers). That said, the more I think about this, the more I feel it may not be the best idea:

  • Since the meaning of longdouble can vary from platform to platform, I wonder what happens if you encode times using longdouble values on one machine and decode them on another?
  • longdouble values cannot be stored with all backends; for example zarr supports it, but netCDF does not.
  • We already provide a robust way to exactly roundtrip any dates--i.e. encode them with int64 values--so adding a less robust (if slightly more flexible in terms of units) option might just cause confusion.

It's perhaps still worth opening this issue for discussion in case others have thoughts that might allay those concerns.

cc: @jswhit @dcherian

 
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