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Comment by dherls | Hacker News Reader

The author fails to mention any of the negative effects they experience due to this go version selection. They say that the effect is "viral" but don't give any concrete examples of why it's a bad thing to keep your toolchain up to date

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It forces a change, where none is called for. Compatibility works both ways. What doesn't matter to me the lib dev, may for matter for someone else. The world is built on portable, flexible code, and pinning to something unnecessarily, breaks that one small part of the world. It's adding an unnecessary requirement. Life is hard enough.

One of the key advantages of Go is its very compatible, you can compile and run early versioned code on the latest compiler without concern and it will just run with less bugs and faster due to all the advancements over time. I don't like being forced to upgrade my tooling until I choose the upgrade but in Go's case its usually trivial.

Anyone with an older toolchain can’t build that library of anything that depends on it.

Some environments might not even have the newer version available.

Anyone with an older toolchain is free to fork it on github, test with the older version, and CI to the project that tests with the older version, and submit a patch, too!

This may not get the project as many users, but not everyone who writes a 50 line project is trying to figure out which versions it supports and setting up full test matrices either.

Not a Go dev, but I typically set up a CI with the oldest toolchains I support (usually a debian release), and only bump those versions when I really need something from the latest versions. Locally I build with the most recent tools. This ensures good enough coverage for very little work, as I notice when I start using something that's newer and can bump the toolchain accordingly.

Sure, but if you start a new small project and throw it on GitHub, it's not totally insane to just put the version you tested. Just because someone put up their tiny library doesn't mean they've put in the effort to figure out which version they need.

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? I'm not sure how this relates to the question being asked.

I did.

If you have an older tool chain, it is on you to fix the library to build with the older tool chain, that's what open source is about!

Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Please double check the message thread to which you're replying.

I am missing this part too. I can't really say ever having a problem upgrading go to the latest version. Now with "go fix", a lot of features are even improved automatically.

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