I honestly think there won't be any big bugs/outages by 2038. Partly because I have a naive optimism that any important system will not only have the OS/stdlibs support 64bit time, but that important systems that need accurate time probably use NTP/network time, and that means their test/dev/qa equivalent deployments can be hooked up to use a test network time server that will simulate post-2038 times to see what crashes.
12 years+ is a long time to prepare for this. Normally I wouldn't have much faith in test/dev systems, network time being setup properly,etc...but it's a long time. Even if none of my assumptions are true, in a decade we couldn't at least identify where 32bit time is being used and plan for contingencies? that's unlikely.
But hey, let me know when Python starts supporting nano-second precision time :'(
Although, it's been a while since I checked to see they support it. In Windows-land at least, everything system-side uses 64bit/nsec precision, as far as I've had to deal with it at least.
My concern is that this is happening 12 years to late. A bunch of embedded stuff will not be replaced in 12 years. We have a lot more tiny devices running all sorts of system, many more than we did 25 years ago. These are frequently in hard to reach places, manufacturers have gone out of business, no updates will be available and no one is going to 2038 validate those devices and their output.
Many of the device going into production now won't have 64bit time, they'll still run version of Linux that was certified, or randomly worked, in 2015. I hope you're right, but in any case it will be worse than Y2K.
12 years+ is a long time to prepare for this. Normally I wouldn't have much faith in test/dev systems, network time being setup properly,etc...but it's a long time. Even if none of my assumptions are true, in a decade we couldn't at least identify where 32bit time is being used and plan for contingencies? that's unlikely.
But hey, let me know when Python starts supporting nano-second precision time :'(
https://stackoverflow.com/a/10612166
Although, it's been a while since I checked to see they support it. In Windows-land at least, everything system-side uses 64bit/nsec precision, as far as I've had to deal with it at least.