When to drop Go 1.8 support?

[methane]

README says: "Go 1.8 or higher. We aim to support the 3 latest versions of Go."

Now Go 1.11 is stable. Can we drop Go 1.8 support in master branch?

[julienschmidt]

If there is a good reason to drop support for Go 1.8: yes.
As long as we didn't introduce any breaking changes, I think we can continue to support it.

[methane]

I'm considering to check connection liveness before sending query.
It needs SyscallConn which is introduced in Go 1.8.

If we can drop Go 1.8 support, we can implement it without version tag and stub file for Go 1.8.

[methane]

#838 can be merged without version tag hack, too.

[julienschmidt]

What's the current situation with platforms like AppEngine? Is it safe to drop Go 1.8 by now?

[methane]

GAE/Go supports 1.9+ only.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/runtime
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations/

[julienschmidt]

It's deprecated but not yet disabled, as it seems.

Anyway, I think removing Go 1.8 support should be fine by now.

[methane]

It's deprecated but not yet disabled, as it seems.

Yes, but "no new deployment". It means already deployed Go 1.8 app are still running.
But no one can use new library with Go 1.8.