proposal: time: add Compare

[ianlancetaylor]

We have a method time.Time.Compare, but we don't have a plain time.Compare function. The latter would be useful as an argument to functions like slices.SortFunc or slices.BinarySearchFunc. I propose

// Compare returns an integer comparing two times.
// If a is before b, it returns -1;
// if a is after b, it returns +1; if they're the same, it returns 0.
func Compare(a, b time.Time) int {
	return a.Compare(b)
}

[mateusz834]

@ianlancetaylor

No need for a new function, time.Time.Compare can be used as:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"slices"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	times := []time.Time{time.Now(), time.Now(), time.Time{}}
	slices.SortFunc(times, time.Time.Compare)
	fmt.Println(times)
}

https://go.dev/play/p/IrQkNDijzYt

[ianlancetaylor]

Ouch, of course. Thanks.