Go 2 For "Breaking With The Past" Will Never Come

An update on the Go programming language roadmap was shared today that highlights some recent improvements for backward compatibility to Go and why the developers now no longer expect to ever have a "Go 2" release that would break compatibility with existing Go 1.x programs.

Following the recent Go 1.21 release, Go developers are effectively doubling down now on their intentions to maintain compatibility for Go code-bases moving forward. In regards to no plans for Go 2 now, Russ Cox of Google wrote in today's blog post:

"That raises an obvious question: when should we expect the Go 2 specification that breaks old Go 1 programs?

The answer is never. Go 2, in the sense of breaking with the past and no longer compiling old programs, is never going to happen. Go 2 in the sense of being the major revision of Go 1 we started toward in 2017 has already happened.

There will not be a Go 2 that breaks Go 1 programs. Instead, we are going to double down on compatibility, which is far more valuable than any possible break with the past. In fact, we believe that prioritizing compatibility was the most important design decision we made for Go 1.

So what you will see over the next few years is plenty of new, exciting work, but done in a careful, compatible way, so that we can keep your upgrades from one toolchain to the next as boring as possible."

Learn more about the Go compatibility plans via the Go.dev blog.