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Comment by wild_egg | Hacker News Reader

Data point of one, but I've been using Go since 2012 and would drop it instantly if any of the backwards compatibility guarantees were relaxed.

Having bugs imposed on you from outside your project is a waste of time to deal with and there are dozens of other languages you can pick from if you enjoy that time sink. Most of them give you greater capabilities as the balance.

Go's stability is a core feature and compensates for the lack of other niceties. Adding features isn't a good reason to break things. I can go use something else if I want to make that trade.

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Respectfully, I don’t think you would just pack up and leave. The cost of switching to an entirely different language—which might have even worse backwards compatibility issues—is significantly higher than fixing bugs you inadvertently introduced due to prior invalid assumptions.

I’d call your bluff.

That's a bit bold when you know nothing about me, but sure.

I exist in a polyglot environment and we use Go for things that we expect to sit and do their job for years without modification.

Nothing more annoying with these than needing to update a runtime to patch a CVE and suddenly needing to invest two weeks to handle all the breaking changes. Go lets us take 5 minutes to bump the version number in the Dockerfile and CI configs and move on to more important work.

I'm not suggesting we'd go rewrite all of those if Go relaxed its guarantees but we'd stop picking it to write new things in and it would slowly disappear as we decommission the existing services over the years.

Every language and its environment has issues. Switching always introduces a new set of problems, some of which could be worse, and many of which you won't have anticipated when you encounter them.

Also, there is a time and a place for things.

Breaking API changes in a minor version update sucks and is often an unexpected time sink, and often mandatory because it has some security patch, critical bug fix, or something.

Breaking API changes in a major version update is expected, can be planned for, and often can be delayed if one chooses.

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