SGTM to this non-FreeBSD user at least. I seem to recall hearing that FreeBSD users update pretty regularly. Is that true?

@minux, @mdempsky, @adg?

Something that might be worth mentioning is that the ports collection (so the "official" packages) rather quickly had various commits to remove compatibility code for FreeBSD 9. So third party software might break on a larger scale.

On the comment of quick updates I also want to mention that the first release of the FreeBSD 10 branch was in January 2014, which means that there have been three years of time to do a major upgrade.

Also currently FreeBSD 10 and FreeBSD 11 are supported and FreeBSD 12 is the development branch.

That is not meant to be an argument for or against this proposal, but just meant to give some context to non-FreeBSD users.

We don't have a clear policy about when to drop support for specific systems. It would be nice if we could establish a general rule.

Maybe the policy should be: after an operating system version is no longer supported by the vendor, Go may drop support after the next two releases, and the release notes for the final release with support must mention that support is going away in the next release.

For example, FreeBSD 9 was dropped on Dec 31 2016; the next two Go releases after that are Go 1.8 and Go 1.9, and we'll likely drop in Go 1.10, but if so we must announce that in Go 1.9's release notes.

-rsc for @golang/proposal-review

Looks like this issue is hijacked. I'll open another issue for code cleanup.

As a data point, gcc obsoleted the support for Solaris 9 in GCC 4.9 (April
2014), and removed its support in GCC 5.0 (April 2015) when the extended
vendor support for Solaris 9 ended in 2014.
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2013-05/msg00728.html

Minor nitpick, Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 are still supported, they
are in what Oracle calls "Sustaining Support phase" for an indefinite
period.

However, we never supported Solaris 8, 9, or 10, so we don't have
to worry about any of that.

However, IIRC correctly Windows XP is still supported in the embedded
SKU, or if you have a special service contract. I think from the
perspective of the Go project, we should continue to treat Windows
XP as a supported system.

Following my recent comment on #19075, it sounds like we're happy with the "Go 1.N can announce that support for will be dropped in Go 1.(N+1)".

Criteria for the cost-benefit analysis for operating systems parallel the ones for hardware in that issue:

• Availability of and support for the OS. If the OS version is no longer available and/or no longer supported, that reduces the expected benefit.
• Actual or expected user base. If no one is using that version, that reduces the expected benefit.
• Incurred ongoing costs of keeping old support (builders, compiler/runtime/syscall code paths, and so on).

Again it may be that the best we can do ahead of time is list the costs and benefits to consider, but not how they must be weighed.

Is that enough? Other considerations?

Accepted pending wiki page, like #19075.

For what it's worth, I agree with @4ad 's comments on Solaris. Realistically, Go generally only needs to support the latest update release of Solaris (e.g. 11.3).

With respect to FreeBSD following the official supported versions is an option, which can be seen here:
https://www.freebsd.org/security/security.html#sup

So currently only 10 and 11 are supported, all other version have reached their EOL.

Not sure if that would work for other OS flavours?

Added https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PortingPolicy#removing-old-operating-system-and-architecture-versions.