Overview

In Go time is represented by the time.Time struct. It struct has a method Sub which can be used to get the difference between two different time values.

currentTime := time.Now()
oldTime := time.Date(2020, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)
diff := currentTime.Sub(oldTime)

The Sub function returns diff which is of type Duration.  It is represented as int64 nanosecond count. type Duration also defines several utility functions which can be used to get difference in

• Hours
• Minutes
• Seconds
• Nanoseconds

Code:

Let’s see a working example of it:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    currentTime := time.Now()
    oldTime := time.Date(2020, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)
    diff := currentTime.Sub(oldTime)

    //In hours
    fmt.Printf("Hours: %f\n", diff.Hours())

    //In minutes
    fmt.Printf("Minutes: %f\n", diff.Minutes())

    //In seconds
    fmt.Printf("Seconds: %f\n", diff.Seconds())

    //In nanoseconds
    fmt.Printf("Nanoseconds: %d\n", diff.Nanoseconds())
}

Output:

Hours 712.985400
Minutes 42779.124024
Seconds 2566747.441457
Nanoseconds 2566747441457000