Working around serde_json bug #464 (serializing pre-epoch mtimes)

You may not know this, but Rust’s serde serialization/deserialization library can panic if you happen to feed it a file modification time prior to the UNIX epoch.

I discovered this when it killed an application I was writing and, in a lapse of reason, reported it on serde_json rather than the Serde core, where the problem code resides. I then went on to file a bug on Rust’s standard library about the API in question being too easy to misuse like this, with the docs not drawing sufficient attention to that hazard.

However, while I’m waiting for them to resolve the problem, I still need to actually get work done, so I cooked up a custom timestamp type that I can #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] on instead, because I felt it was simpler, cleaner, more concise code than overriding the default serialization for something like the Rust SystemTime type which serializes to a non-primitive JSON type.

Here’s the code I came up with, in case anyone else needs it:

Working around serde_json bug #464 (serializing pre-epoch mtimes) by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.