Operating systems spend a lot of time designing APIs for you to deal with time correctly. The approach you've described is a limitation in Go, not inherent in general software development.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/clock_nanosleep.2.html https://developer.apple.com/documentation/dispatch/1420517-d...

OS timers when given a wall-clock expiry will do the right thing when the system wall-clock jumps.