A Time represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision.

Programs using times should typically store and pass them as values, not pointers. That is, time variables and struct fields should be of type time.Time, not *time.Time.

A Time value can be used by multiple goroutines simultaneously except that the methods GobDecode, UnmarshalBinary, UnmarshalJSON and UnmarshalText are not concurrency-safe.

Time instants can be compared using the Before, After, and Equal methods. The Sub method subtracts two instants, producing a Duration. The Add method adds a Time and a Duration, producing a Time.

The zero value of type Time is January 1, year 1, 00:00:00.000000000 UTC. As this time is unlikely to come up in practice, the IsZero method gives a simple way of detecting a time that has not been initialized explicitly.

Each Time has associated with it a Location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time, such as in the Format, Hour, and Year methods. The methods Local, UTC, and In return a Time with a specific location. Changing the location in this way changes only the presentation; it does not change the instant in time being denoted and therefore does not affect the computations described in earlier paragraphs.

Representations of a Time value saved by the GobEncode, MarshalBinary, MarshalJSON, and MarshalText methods store the Time.Location's offset, but not the location name. They therefore lose information about Daylight Saving Time.

In addition to the required “wall clock” reading, a Time may contain an optional reading of the current process's monotonic clock, to provide additional precision for comparison or subtraction. See the “Monotonic Clocks” section in the package documentation for details.

Note that the Go == operator compares not just the time instant but also the Location and the monotonic clock reading. Therefore, Time values should not be used as map or database keys without first guaranteeing that the identical Location has been set for all values, which can be achieved through use of the UTC or Local method, and that the monotonic clock reading has been stripped by setting t = t.Round(0). In general, prefer t.Equal(u) to t == u, since t.Equal uses the most accurate comparison available and correctly handles the case when only one of its arguments has a monotonic clock reading.