What is the `zero` value for time.Time in Go?

In an error condition, I tried to return nil, which throws the error:

cannot use nil as type time.Time in return argument

What is the zero value for time.Time?

Invoking an empty time.Time struct literal will return Go's zero date. Thus, for the following print statement:

fmt.Println(time.Time{})

The output is:

0001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC

For the sake of completeness, the official documentation explicitly states:


The zero value of type Time is January 1, year 1, 00:00:00.000000000 UTC.

Stack Overflow Q#23051973, score: 311