Golang and EOL of Windows 7 (Windows Server 2008)

[Pier-Hugues Pellerin]

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to find information about how the Go team deals with EOL of a specific platform.
I am working on products that currently support Windows 7 and were users will not move quickly out of the
platform.

Since the EOL of Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008) is scheduled for January 14, 2020,  I would like to know if there is any
plan to remove that platform and if so is there a target version for that removal?

I've looked at the Github tracker, but I haven't found anything related to that.

Thanks

PH

[Tyler Compton]

As a data point, Go stopped supporting Windows XP in Go 1.10. That's 4 years after Microsoft officially ended support for the operating system. I don't think that's a hard rule, and it will probably depend on what version Go's main Windows contributors use.

Relevant issue: https://golang.org/issues/23380

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[Ian Lance Taylor]

Our general policy is that Go stops supporting a platform when the
vendor stops providing security patches for the platform. We don't
actively break old platforms, but we stop testing against them, and we
stop rejecting changes that break them, and so they do tend to break
in newer versions of Go.

I don't think we've discussed when we will stop supporting Windows 7.

If you want to stick to an old platform, it's probably best to not
upgrade to newer versions of Go.

Ian

[Pier-Hugues Pellerin]

Thanks both of you.

Yes running an old version is a solution but this will mean that we might miss some important security fixes.

Anywhere I can subscribe for theses kind of discussion?

--

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ph

Software Engineer

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 6:20 AM Pier-Hugues Pellerin <p...@elastic.co> wrote:
>
> Yes running an old version is a solution but this will mean that we might miss some important security fixes.

That is true, but honestly I would worry more about missing security
fixes for Windows than I would about Go. Not that Go is so much
better than Windows when it comes to security, but the attack surface
on Windows is much much larger.

> Anywhere I can subscribe for theses kind of discussion?

For a significant platform like Windows we would mention a decision to
stop support here on golang-nuts. Any actual discussion about the
decision would most likely occur on the issue tracker
(https://golang.org/issue, hosted on GitHub), but I don't know if
there is a way to have a filtered subscription to the issue tracker.

Ian