Sugar - Standard Library Extension

Sugar is an extension to Dart's standard library.

It provides the following (and much more!):

• Date-time and timezone API inspired by java.time.
• Monads such as Result<S,F> & Maybe<T>.
• Syntax sugar for aggregating & manipulating collections.
• Types for representing and working with ranges & intervals.

It consolidates several micro-packages that provide bits and pieces of date-time & timezone utilities into a single package.

Why Sugar's date-time API over other packages?

• Sugar is able to detect the platform's timezone, ZonedDateTime.now(). Other packages such as timezone and even Dart's standard library don't. DateTime.timeZoneName returns an ambiguous abbreviation that can refer to multiple timezones. Sugar provide a TZ database timezone identifier such as Asia/Singapore. See List of timezone abbreviations.

• Sugar is less hassle to set up. You don't need to fiddle with assets or asynchronously initialize the library. Simply create a ZonedDateTime.

• Sugar has (in theory) zero initialization cost & a better memory footprint. Other packages often parse the timezone information from binary files at runtime. We rely on code generation to eliminate IO completely. Other packages often load the entire TZ database into memory. We rely on lazy initialization to load only timezones you use, reducing memory footprint.

• Sugar handles DST transitions similar to other packages such as Java, Python & C#. Other packages such as timezone don't. This can be an issue when interacting between a back-end written in one of those languages and a front-end written in Dart.

• Sugar offers more than just ZonedDateTime. It offers classes such as LocalTime & Period, and utilities such as retrieving the ordinal week of the year.

Getting Started

Run the following command:

dart pub add sugar

Alternatively, add Sugar as a dependency in your pubspec:

dependencies:
  sugar: ^3.1.0

Import the library:

import 'package:sugar/sugar.dart';

Check out the documentation to get started.