please continue High Sierra mac OSX support

[Jason E. Aten]

The Go 1.20 release notes say:

> Go 1.20 is the last release that will run on macOS 10.13 High Sierra or 10.14 Mojave. Go 1.21 will require macOS 10.15 Catalina or later.

This is sad to hear, since High Sierra is the preferred (most stable) available mac operating system.

Please consider continuing to support High Sierra in future Go versions.

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Our general guideline is that we stop supporting an operating system
when that operating system is itself no longer supported. According
to Wikipedia, Apple stopped supporting High Sierra in 2020, so
presumably people should be moving off it. It's also going to be
steadily harder for us to test it. What's the argument for us
continuing to support it?

Ian

[robert engels]

I’d like to understand this a bit better as well. I currently develop an OSX app using Xcode/Obj-C and it runs all the way back to 10.9 (I recently raised the requirement from 10.7).

Is the restriction only that the Go tool chain needs 10.15, but the produced binaries will work on an earlier version? Because that seems reasonable.

Or do I have to use an old version of Go to produce binaries that run on an old version of OSX? This seems highly restrictive and harkens to the days of M$ and the continual upgrade cycles that churned through resources.

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[Jason E. Aten]

Primarily the argument is that High Sierra is the most stable version of OSX,

 and thus preferred by those who highly value stability and reliability. It is also the only

version supported on older hardware, such as my 2015 mac book pro. These mac books

have superior keyboards and better access to USB ports and HDMI ports. They are readily available on 

the used market for testing purposes. Just last week I bought my wife one for only $320.

There are tens if not hundreds of listings on ebay.

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 9:40 AM robert engels <ren...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I’d like to understand this a bit better as well. I currently develop an OSX app using Xcode/Obj-C and it runs all the way back to 10.9 (I recently raised the requirement from 10.7).
>
> Is the restriction only that the Go tool chain needs 10.15, but the produced binaries will work on an earlier version? Because that seems reasonable.
>
> Or do I have to use an old version of Go to produce binaries that run on an old version of OSX? This seems highly restrictive and harkens to the days of M$ and the continual upgrade cycles that churned through resources.

What dropping support means is that we no longer fix bugs that only
occur on unsupported releases, and we no longer run our tests on old
releases. That includes both running the Go tools, and running
programs produced by the Go tools.

We don't go out of our way to cause Go to break on unsupported
releases. That said, there are occasionally cases where we change Go
to require APIs that are only available on newer releases. That has
happened on macOS in the sense that we no longer support 386 or arm at
all; we only support amd64 and arm64. I don't know offhand if there
have been other such cases for macOS (there have been for Linux: for
example, we now require the accept4 system call to be supported
(except on arm)).

Our position is that it is actually Apple that is driving the upgrade
cycle you mention, not us. Apple chose to drop support for High
Sierra back in 2020, so anybody running a High Sierra system connected
to the Internet is at risk. Should we invest our limited resources on
supporting releases that even Apple has declined to support? If Apple
continued to support High Sierra, so would we.

Ian

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 9:42 AM Jason E. Aten <j.e....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Primarily the argument is that High Sierra is the most stable version of OSX,
> and thus preferred by those who highly value stability and reliability. It is also the only
> version supported on older hardware, such as my 2015 mac book pro. These mac books
> have superior keyboards and better access to USB ports and HDMI ports. They are readily available on
> the used market for testing purposes. Just last week I bought my wife one for only $320.
> There are tens if not hundreds of listings on ebay.

Thanks. Required for older hardware seems like a valid reason to me.

Please comment on https://go.dev/issue/57125, which is the proposal
for dropping High Sierra support.

Ian

[Robert Engels]

That’s a reasonable position. Yea, I’ve haven’t been too happy with Apple either in terms of newer OSes not working on older hardware - usually for no reason other than to drive hardware upgrades.

> On Feb 3, 2023, at 12:33 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <ia...@golang.org> wrote:

[jlfo...@berkeley.edu]

I have a Mid 2013 Macbook Pro that stopped being supported by MacOS several releases ago.

I heard about OpenCore, which magically patches the installer for the current release of MacOS

to run on older hardware. To my utter amazement, it works! I'm now running the latest version

of MacOS Ventura on a ~11 year old Macbook.

I'm not saying that the Go project should officially recommend doing this, but people with older

hardware who would otherwise be off the air, it's something to consider.

Cordially,

Jon Forrest

[Mike Schinkel]

Hi Ian,

I too would like to see support for High Sierra continue. Here is some additional information to support the hardware argument.

Currently on eBay there are over 300 Mac Minis from mid 2010 and mid 2011 and a quick eyeball makes it seem like they can be had for less than US$100. (And that doesn't count MacBooks or iMacs.) They are an excellent machine for someone who can't afford a new Mac to buy and needs to set up as a home server for macOS-related work.

There are numerous videos on YouTube about using 2010 and 2011 Mac Minis (and even more about using mid 2012):

https://youtu.be/gTqlVdSfGK0

https://youtu.be/iqn2xGt3sos

https://youtu.be/9yFewmhDymc

Anyway, if GoLang stops supporting this hardware then these would no longer viable for testing and/or running newer Go code on macOS, albeit an earlier O/S version.

Anyway, I know that a lot has to be taken into consideration but I wanted to add more details about how much hardware like this is available and what people might be using it for.

-Mike

P.S. I'll follow up over on the ticket, too.