Calculating the Difference Between Two Time Periods in Go

Go (or Golang) is known for its simplicity and speed, making it a great choice for systems programming and concurrent applications.

When dealing with time-based data in Go, the time package provides robust support for manipulating dates, times, and durations.

In this sub-article, we’ll demonstrate how to calculate the difference between two time periods in Go. This example builds on the concepts discussed in our C lead article, but utilizes Go's native time package for accurate and efficient calculations.

Required Package

To work with time in Go, you'll need the time package:

import "time"

Go Program: Calculate the Difference Between Two Time Periods

// DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TIME PERIODS in Go using time package
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    // Step-1 Define the start and end time using time.Date
    startTime := time.Date(2025, time.July, 4, 9, 15, 20, 0, time.UTC)
    endTime := time.Date(2025, time.July, 12, 18, 30, 10, 0, time.UTC)

    // Step-2 Calculate the difference
    duration := endTime.Sub(startTime)

    // Step-3 Extract hours, minutes, and seconds
    hours := int(duration.Hours())
    minutes := int(duration.Minutes()) % 60
    seconds := int(duration.Seconds()) % 60

    // Step-4 Display the result
    fmt.Printf("\nTIME DIFFERENCE: %d HOURS, %d MINUTES, %d SECONDS\n", hours, minutes, seconds)
}

Output

Explanation

• The time.Date() function is used to define the starting and ending timestamps with the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and location (time zone).

• The Sub() method calculates the difference between the two time.Time objects, returning a Duration.

• We extract the duration in hours, minutes, and seconds for display.

This approach in Go is efficient and works well in a variety of applications, especially when performance is critical, such as in high-frequency trading or real-time systems.

Extra Metric: Duration in Days

To compute the duration in days, you can use:

days := int(duration.Hours() / 24)
fmt.Printf("TOTAL DAYS: %d\n", days)

Output

This is particularly useful when working with long durations, such as calculating the number of days between two events for scheduling or logging.