While crites@ was investigating using protobuf to represent Apache Beam timestamps within the TestStreamEvents, he found out that the well known type google.protobuf.Timestamp doesn't support certain timestamps we were using in our tests (specifically the max timestamp that Apache Beam supports).
This lead me to investigate and the well known type google.protobuf.Timestamp supports dates/times from 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z to 9999-12-31T23:59:59.999999999Z which is much smaller than the timestamp range that Apache Beam currently supports -9223372036854775ms to 9223372036854775ms which is about 292277BC to 294247AD (it was difficult to find a time range that represented this). Similarly the google.protobuf.Duration represents any time range over those ~10000 years. Google decided to limit their range to be compatible with the RFC 3339[2] standard to which does simplify many things since it guarantees that all RFC 3339 time parsing/manipulation libraries are supported. Should we: A) define our own timestamp/duration types to be able to represent the full time range that Apache Beam can express? B) limit the valid timestamps in Apache Beam to some standard such as RFC 3339? This discussion is somewhat related to the efforts to support nano timestamps[2]. 1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339 2: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/86a4dcabdaa1dd93c9a55d16ee51edcff6266eda05221acbf9cf666d@%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E
