How do I get the current time in Elm 0.17/0.18?

Question

I had asked this question already:
How do I get the current time in Elm?

And answered it by writing my own (now deprecated) variant of start-ap

Answer 1

You could create a Native module, and then expose a timestamp function that gets the time from Date.now() in JavaScript.

This is roughly what it would look like:

Timestamp.elm

module Timestamp exposing (timestamp)

import Native.Timestamp

timestamp : () -> Int
timestamp a = Native.Timestamp.timestamp a

Native/Timestamp.js

var _YourRepoUserName$your_repo$Native_Timestamp = function() {
  return { timestamp: function(a) {return Date.now()}
}

Main.elm

port module Main exposing (..)

import Timestamp exposing (timestamp)

then you can use (timestamp ()) anywhere in Elm to get the current timestamp as an Int.

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Note: I used timestamp : () -> Int because I couldn't get it to work otherwise. timestamp : Int simply returned the hardcoded time of first load.

Let me know if this could be improved.