Does building with an older golang use package sources from that older version?

[Andrew Athan]

Say I install golang 1.20.12 and go clean -cache and go clean -modcache.

Then I build.

Will that executable be using crypto/tls and other packages "as they were in 1.20.12"? Or is golang fetching the newest available compatible sources, and therefore I may be spinning my wheels trying to see if there is a bug in the latest crypto/tls?

[Axel Wagner]

You don't even need to run `go clean`. Go will automatically detect whether stuff needs to be rebuilt, as the Go version used to build a package is part of a hash, that is used as a key for the build cache.

And yes, it will use the standard library packages of the Go version that is installed (the one output by `go env GOROOT`). In fact, if you just change the on-disk content of those packages (e.g. edit `$(go env GOROOT)/src/fmt/format.go`) it will automatically detect that and rebuild the changed standard library packages as needed, just like it would with a first party package. This can be a very useful (and fun) debugging tool, as it means you can actually insert debug printfs *into the stdlib* to see what is happening.

All of this assumes your Go installation is setup correctly, of course.

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