Leap second , the only existence that can make Meta, Google, Microsoft and other giants reach an agreement with Linus Torvalds, the violent father of Linux, this existence that has caused headaches for countless programmers, is finally cancelled !
At the 27th International Conference on Weights and Measures this year, delegates passed a resolution to suspend the addition of "leap seconds" to official clocks from 2035 to synchronize them with the Earth's rotation.
In fact, as early as July, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon jointly proposed to abolish the leap second.
So how did the leap second come about? In fact, this concept was first proposed by the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) in 1972.
There are two time measurement systems in the world, one is "universal time" based on the rotation of the earth, and the other is "atomic time" based on the frequency cycle of atomic transitions.
What is displayed on our daily computers and mobile phones is atomic time. Due to the erratic rate of rotation of the Earth, the two timekeeping systems will differ slightly over time.
When the difference between the atomic time and the universal time reaches 0.9 seconds, the atomic time will be artificially increased or decreased by 1 second to get as close as possible to the universal time. This correction is the leap second.
Since 1972, the leap second has occurred 27 times. The extra second will cause the computer to be "disordered".
In June 2012, the famous news social networking site Reddit was suddenly paralyzed for about 40 minutes. At the same time, many websites including the open source community Mozilla and LinkedIn also suddenly crashed.
It is because there is an extra time in this night - 23:59:60, the extra second caused the unprepared computer program to generate an exception and crash.
When the leap second was implemented in 2015, about 2,000 computer networks around the world were suddenly and briefly interrupted; the American Intercontinental Exchange, which owns institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange, was forced to suspend trading for 61 minutes.
The decision of the Metrology Conference to cancel the leap second is undoubtedly a boon for programmers, but looking at the time, it will not be implemented until 2035, which is still more than ten years away.
In other words, when the leap second was abolished, the coders in 2000 were already 35 years old. Those in the 1990s were in their forties . Even if the resolution takes effect, the current code farmers will have to persist for more than ten years before they can enjoy the benefits of this resolution.
Moreover, not everyone supports the abolition of the leap second. Like Russia, after the abolition of the leap second, their satellite positioning system GLONASS also needs to be adjusted and redesigned accordingly. They prefer to postpone the abolition of the leap second until 2040 .
Not to mention the problems caused by the cancellation of the leap second itself. Some scientists have done calculations. If the leap second is cancelled, the time we use will differ from the universal time by about 1 minute in about 50 years.
After 300 years, the difference is 10 minutes, and after 900 years, the difference can reach 1 hour. If the schedule remains the same, people will go to work and school one day in the future.
But think about it, who can say what will happen after 900 years? I don’t know how many technological innovations and developments have been made in 900 years. Maybe there will be a better solution by then.
What programmers should do at this stage may be to continue to battle with leap seconds for more than ten years.