Talk:Time and clock RTS Functions

Extracted from the internal comments of SDSCM00037169:

I agree that the C standard does not specify the epoch. However, the epoch is 1970 by convention and this is well known. I have never encountered a C standard library time function that did not use 1970 as an epoch before. There are non-standard time function which use other epoch, but these have a different name. Any embedded programmer using the standard named functions is going to expect it to use 1970 as did the customer who originally reported the problem. Any systems that exchange time information in the "standard" unix time format are going to expect it to be 1970-based.

So while technically you may be correct that it is not violating a standard it is definitely non-standard and anybody who uses these time functions that depend on an agreed upon epoch are going to encounter this problem. It also means that the customer has to put build-time conditionals around any time-using code, making it dependent on which tools are being used. The time handling code that works one way for every other toolchain they have ever used will produce a different result when switching to the TI compiler.