golang / golang/go

x/website: canonical GOEXPERIMENT documentation

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#80,969 2 comments 5 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@prattmic is already working on this.

Since Aug 20, 2026.

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Description

Go supports a variety of different GOEXPERIMENTs for different purposes, but we have almost no documentation on what GOEXPERIMENTs are, how to use them, or what guarantees we provide. Pretty much the only documentation exists in release notes or blog posts discussing specific experiments.

https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/go-experiments-explained is a nice blog post covering GOEXPERIMENTs, which specifically notes how difficult it is to even discover what experiments exist.

Likely due to the lack of documentation, it's not very clear what level of support GOEXPERIMENTs have, or how they interact with the compatibility promise.

We should have canonical documentation covering all of this, likely something akin to https://go.dev/doc/godebug.

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