GoLand 2020.1.2 debugger does not "officially" support Go 11.5
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I upgraded GoLand to 2020.1.2 from my 2019 version and when I start the debugger, I am greeted with:
Go 1.11.5 is not officially supported by the debugger, some features might work incorrectly. Please upgrade to go 1.12.0 or newer.
Which makes me sad because, I work for a small company with limited resources so it's not easy to upgrade the production version of Go to accommodate developer tools.
That said, I would like to know if it is essential I downgrade to a 2019 version (and which version) or at least what features may not work properly. I checked the release notes I could find and didn't see any guidance on what debugger features won't work in Go 11.5 and GoLand 2020.1.2.
Please advise.
Thank you.
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Hi Peter,
Please allow me to describe the situation while providing you with an answer to the question.
This is required by Delve, the Go debugger that we are using to handle the debugging operations.
Since Delve deprecates older Go versions as they move along, we are following suit every time we upgrade the debugger.
Currently, the policy of Delve is to support only the current version and the previous two versions before that.
This means that when Go 1.15 will launch in July/August, Delve will deprecate Go 1.13 support.
What does this mean?
It means that the Delve developers are not actively maintaining support for those Go versions and, if any changes are made to improve the debugging support, e.g. support a newer version of Go, or support some other features that might result in older, unsupported Go versions, having a poor/broken debugging experience.
As Go has a life-cycle of two versions being supported at any time, so just one year of support, Delve accommodates three versions, so 1.5 years of Go versions support.
At the moment, there is no such list of incompatible features, and per the CI file here, there is also no interest in knowing this.
From our side:
At the moment, this is just a warning in the IDE, and it's done to remind users that they should upgrade to a newer Go version.
However, you'll still be able to debug your applications as you used to.
We totally understand that not everyone can upgrade as soon as a new Go version is released, and, in fact, sometimes they shouldn't, but we have to continue to upgrade the debugger to be able to provide improved security, and newer features, stability and performance improvements.
Since we cannot control this, we recommend that you spend some time every year and a half and upgrade to a newer Go version, to also benefit from the improvements in performance and features of Go.
But please continue upgrading GoLand as you'll receive a lot more benefits, than headaches.
We'll do a better job and mark this in the release notes in the future, thank you for signaling this to us.
I hope this addresses your question and concerns.
Hello Florin,
Thank you very much for your response. It does indeed answer my question quite eloquently.
I certainly understand the JetBrains/Delve dilemma and totally agree with the JetBrains approach.
I am not a fan of technical debt, so I will encourage my company to consider upgrading Go in the near future.
Best,
Peter...