struct timespec {
time_t tv_sec; /* seconds */
long tv_nsec; /* nanoseconds */
};In 4.5 billion years we would live in the result of the Milky way galaxy merging with Andromeda, which will increase our chances of encountering either alien life, or alien artificial entities.
And after 200+ billion years, the sun, after having been a red giant and evaporated all oceans on Earth, will become a white dwarf.
Technically speaking, that would be the end of our problems unless
> the Milky way galaxy merging with Andromeda
won't finish us first or... some stray asteroid of sufficiently lethal size and speed bumps into our green/blue golf ball
It seems to implement BigInts as BCD where each decimal digit gets it's own int32, implements division, then suggests kernel upstreaming. All as a solution for arbitrary spans of time.
Based on this, it has to be a joke, or at least a tongue-in-cheek exercise that is "solving" an imaginary problem.
It's not? But it's predicated on the idea that human life hundreds of billions of years from now will be more or less the same as it is now, to the extent that they'll even still be using the same APIs and OSs. It's difficult to believe someone would posit that as anything other than a joke.
Next time, just say it was a joke.