[permitted by the Go 1 compatibility rules](/doc/go1compat).
Even so, Go provides a mechanism called GODEBUG to
reduce the impact such changes have on Go developers
using newer toolchains to compile old code.

A GODEBUG setting is a `key=value` pair
that controls the execution of certain parts of a Go program.
The environment variable `GODEBUG`
can hold a comma-separated list of these settings.