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title: "Go, Backwards Compatibility, and GODEBUG"
layout: article
---

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## Introduction {#intro}

Go's emphasis on backwards compatibility is one of its key strengths.
There are, however, times when we cannot maintain complete compatibility.

not be referenced from Go code; static functions are permitted.

See $GOROOT/cmd/cgo/internal/teststdio and $GOROOT/misc/cgo/gmp for examples. See
"C? Go? Cgo!" for an introduction to using cgo:
https://golang.org/doc/articles/c_go_cgo.html.

CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, FFLAGS and LDFLAGS may be defined with pseudo
#cgo directives within these comments to tweak the behavior of the C, C++