Use of ctime needs to be phased out and updated to strftime

[rezalas]

With ctime not being thread safe the suggested replacement is strftime for safety. Doing so requires a refactor of all time_t as well, since they can't be used with strftime and are also not thread safe.

see:
ctime c++ ref
strftime c++ ref

[sean-gilliam]

Here's a small snippet that outputs the same values for both ctime and strftime

Input:

#include <iostream>
#include <ctime>

int main()
{
    auto result = std::time(nullptr);
    std::cout << std::ctime(&result) << std::endl;

    char buffer [80];
    auto t = std::time(nullptr);
    auto lt = std::localtime(&t);

    //TODO: check the return value to see if bytes are filled
    std::strftime(buffer, 80, "%a %b %2d %T %Y%n", lt);
    std::cout <<  buffer << std::endl;
  
    return 0;
}

Output:

> clang++-7 -pthread -std=c++17 -o main main.cpp
> ./main
Thu Oct 27 22:18:34 2022

Thu Oct 27 22:18:34 2022

>