Why is there no Span::MIN or Span::MAX?

[BurntSushi]

Why is there no Span::MAX/Span::MIN? just curious

Originally posted by @jessekrubin in jessekrubin/ry#229 (comment)

[BurntSushi]

Unlike a SignedDuration which is just a single 96-bit integer number of nanoseconds, a Span is a more complicated type that keeps track of each individual unit separately. In theory, you could express a maximal Span by building a Span using the maximum supported values for each unit. But I think this is somewhat odd, and it's not clear if there is a good use case for it. Moreover, a Span itself doesn't support Eq or Ord comparisons directly, and instead you must call Span::compare. In part so that time zones/varying quantities can be handled, but also because real work needs to be done to normalize the two Spans being compared. For example, 120.minutes() versus 2.hours(). These are distinct values in memory but are equivalent durations.

To be clear, Jiff could provide a Span::MIN and Span::MAX. But I'd want to understand the use cases for it carefully.

[jessekrubin]

AH the real world.

I was just curious. The only real-world use-case I can think of is literally my use case of building fuzz testing things.

[BurntSushi]

Yeah for that I would just create it manually. The minimum and maximum values of each unit are documented as panicking conditions (for infallible constructors) and error conditions (for fallible consturctors): https://docs.rs/jiff/latest/jiff/struct.Span.html#method.years