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Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

Would anyone be able to explain to me what this means (from the release notes [1])?

> Go 1.10 is the last release that will run on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Go 1.11 will require OS X 10.10 Yosemite or later.

Would Go programs just not compile on those OS versions, or not run entirely?

[1] https://golang.org/doc/go1.10

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> Would Go programs just not compile on those OS versions, or not run entirely?

It means we are not going to test on those old systems anymore, so we make no promises about either.

Also, how is this not a breaking change? They talk so much about BC but cut minor releases that don't run on the same OS versions as the previous release? Same with FreeBSD:

> As announced in the Go 1.9 release notes, Go 1.10 now requires FreeBSD 10.3 or later; support for FreeBSD 9.3 has been removed.

This is what the Go 1 Promise has to say about operating systems. They very specifically call that out as an area where they do not guarantee compatibility.

https://golang.org/doc/go1compat#operating_systems

FreeBSD 9 has been EOLed a while ago.

> Go 1.10 is the last release that will run on Windows XP or Windows Vista. Go 1.11 will require Windows 7 or later.

The OS X >= 10.10 and Windows >= 7 requirements of Go 1.11 is good reason to maintain compatibility/support for 1.10 for some time. I don't have a sense for the impact to *bad systems in use.

Not run at all I think. Go is more strongly coupled to systems than most languages as it implements a lot itself, eg it directly uses the (non stable) syscall interface on osx.

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