Nyx provides built-in time functions for the most common needs: Unix timestamps in seconds, a monotonic clock in milliseconds, a formatted current datetime string, and conversion from an epoch value back to a human-readable date. No import is required for these primitives.
// 19: Date and time — timestamps, formatting, sleep fn main() -> int { // Current Unix timestamp — the WALL clock let now: int = time_epoch() print("Unix timestamp: " + int_to_string(now)) // NOT the same clock with more precision: monotonic_ms() counts from when // the MACHINE booted, so it is a duration source, never a date. Read it // twice and subtract; a single reading is not a timestamp. let t0: int = monotonic_ms() sleep(5) let elapsed_ms: int = monotonic_ms() - t0 print("Elapsed ms: " + int_to_string(elapsed_ms)) // Formatted datetime let dt: String = datetime_now() print("Current datetime: " + dt) // From epoch let formatted: String = datetime_from_epoch(now) print("From epoch: " + formatted) return 0 }
Unix timestamp: 1744761600 Milliseconds: 172479724 Current datetime: 2026-04-15 12:00:00 From epoch: 2026-04-15 12:00:00
How it works
time() returns the current Unix timestamp as an int — the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC). This is the standard way to record event times, measure durations by subtracting two timestamps, or set expiry times for caches and tokens.
time_ms() returns a monotonic timestamp in milliseconds — a different clock, not time() scaled up: it counts from an arbitrary origin, so it is right for measuring durations and for generating increasing IDs, and wrong for dates. datetime_now() returns the local time formatted as a human-readable string in ISO-8601 style.
datetime_from_epoch(ts) converts any Unix timestamp back to the same human-readable format. This is handy when you store raw timestamps in a database or log file and want to display them later. For more advanced date arithmetic — adding days, parsing arbitrary formats, or working with time zones — see std/datetime.