in swift is a date always in GMT/UTC
Asked on 2025-08-06
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In Swift, a Date object does not inherently store time zone information. It represents a specific point in time, independent of any time zone. When you create a Date object, it is essentially a timestamp that is based on the number of seconds since the reference date, which is January 1, 2001, at 00:00:00 UTC (GMT).
When you display or format a Date object, you can choose to represent it in any time zone using a DateFormatter. By default, if you do not specify a time zone, the system's current time zone is used for formatting. However, the underlying Date value remains the same, as it is always in UTC.
For more detailed information on date and time handling in Swift, you might want to check out the session on Swift libraries, such as Foundation, which includes APIs for date and time formatting. You can find this in the What’s new in Swift session.
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll briefly go through a history of Swift over the past decade, and show you how the community has grown through workgroups, expanded the package ecosystem, and increased platform support. We’ll introduce you to a new language mode that achieves data-race safety by default, and a language subset that lets you run Swift on highly constrained systems. We’ll also explore some language updates including noncopyable types, typed throws, and improved C++ interoperability.
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What’s new in Swift
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