The Temporal object enables date and time management in various scenarios, including built-in time zone and calendar representation, wall-clock time c

Temporal - JavaScript | MDN

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2025-01-21 04:30:04

The Temporal object enables date and time management in various scenarios, including built-in time zone and calendar representation, wall-clock time conversions, arithmetics, formatting, and more. It is designed as a full replacement for the Date object.

Unlike most global objects, Temporal is not a constructor. You cannot use it with the new operator or invoke the Temporal object as a function. All properties and methods of Temporal are static (just like the Math object).

Temporal has an intricate and powerful API. It exposes over 200 utility methods via several classes, so it could appear very complex. We will provide a high-level overview of how these APIs are related to each other.

JavaScript has had the Date object for handling date and time since its first days. However, the Date API is based on the poorly designed java.util.Date class from Java, which was replaced in the early 2010s; but, because of JavaScript's goal of backward compatibility, Date sticks around in the language.

The important lesson to preface the whole introduction is that date handling is complex. Most of the problems of Date are fixable by adding more methods, but a fundamental design flaw remains: it exposes so many methods on the same object that developers are often confused about what to use, leading to unexpected pitfalls. A well-designed API not only needs to do more, but also should do less with each level of abstraction, because preventing misuse is as important as enabling use cases.