Date and time type for use with Protobuf

Question

I'm considering to use Protocol Buffers for data exchange between a Linux and a Windows based system.

Whats the recommended format for sending date/time (timestamp) values? The field should be small when serialized.

Answer 1

Although you aren't saying which languages you are using or what kind of precision you need, I would suggest using Unix time encoded into a int64. It is fairly easy to handle in most languages and platforms (see here for a Windows example), and Protobufs will use a varint-encoding keeping the size small without limiting the representable range too much.