What is the difference between Clock.systemUTC() and Clock.systemDefaultZone()?

Question

I'm looking at the Clock class from java so that I can inject it as a dependency for better testability. But I don't understand the difference between the two methods systemUTC and systemDefaultZone. The Instant.now() seems to be internally using systemUTC clock whereas YearMonth.now() uses the systemDefaultZone clock. I already read the javadoc but it wasn't very clear to me.

I have code that use Instant.now() and YearMonth.now() and would like to understand the difference between the two clocks with some examples where using each the clocks wrongly can lead to a problem.

Answer 1

In terms of the instant method of the two clocks returned by Clock.systemUTC and Clock.systemDefaultZone, they will do the same thing. Both of their documentation says that the clocks are "based on the best available system clock". So creating Instants using the clocks will always give you the same instant.

The difference in behaviour comes when you try to create a date or time. systemUTC does this:

Conversion from instant to date or time uses the UTC time-zone.

Whereas systemDefaultZone does this:

converting to date and time using the default time-zone.

So although both will return the same instant if you ask them what the current instant is, they will not necessarily return the same LocalDateTime, or LocalDate, or ZonedDateTime. For example, suppose my system timezone is Asia/Shanghai, which is at an offset of UTC+8 all year round. And it is now 5 am on 2020-07-29 in Shanghai. If I do LocalDate.now(Clock.systemUTC()), it will tell me 2020-07-28, because it's still the 28th in the UTC timezone. If I do LocalDate.now(Clock.systemDefaultZone()), however, it will tell me 2020-07-29, because it is 2020-07-29 in Shanghai (which is the system timezone).

Now you should see why the parameterless now of date/time related classes use systemDefaultZone. It would be weird if I did LocalTime.now() in Shanghai and saw a time that's 8 hours earlier!