I forgot how I bumped into this, but a while ago I found this interesting 2023 post: [Wayback/Archive] It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated – miguelgrinberg.com explaining naive (without time zone) and aware (with time zone) date time objects.
It reminded me of Delphi, where NowUTC – as Delphi does have neither naive or aware date time objects – returns a floating point value (yes, it has a separate TDateTime type, but it represents the number of days that have passed since December 30, 1899 which in face stems from the Windows OLE Automation era* (OLE Automation is a subset of COM), see [Wayback/Archive] DateTime.ToOADate Method (System) | Microsoft Learn.
That method is mentioned in [Wayback/Archive] Why You Should Use NowUTC Instead of Now in Delphi: A Quick Guide – YouTube and Delphi deserves a way better infrastructure of date and time handling.
So this post is also a reminder to myself: figure out if there is an object oriented DateTime library for Delphi yet, and if not see if there is interest to create one similar to [Wayback/Archive] Noda Time | Date and time API for .NET by Jon Skeet.





