Pinner is not unpinned while the Go pointer is stored in C memory.
This implies that C code may not keep a copy of a string, slice,
channel, and so forth, because they cannot be pinned with
[runtime.Pinner].

The _GoString_ type also may not be pinned with [runtime.Pinner].
Because it includes a Go pointer, the memory it points to is only pinned
for the duration of the call; _GoString_ values may not be retained by C
code.

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

<!--
This document is kept in the Go repo, not x/website,
because it documents the full list of known GODEBUG settings,
which are tied to a specific release.
-->

## Introduction {#intro}

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

// UTF-8-encoded rune as a token. The sequence of runes returned is
// equivalent to that from a range loop over the input as a string, which
// means that erroneous UTF-8 encodings translate to U+FFFD = "\xef\xbf\xbd".
// Because of the Scan interface, this makes it impossible for the client to
// distinguish correctly encoded replacement runes from encoding errors.
func ScanRunes(data []byte, atEOF bool) (advance int, token []byte, err error) {

		in.expectText("expected identifier after '#'")
	}
	if !in.enabled() {
		// Can only start including again if we are at #else or #endif but also
		// need to keep track of nested #if[n]defs.
		// We let #line through because it might affect errors.
		switch in.Stack.Text() {
		case "else", "endif", "ifdef", "ifndef", "line":
			// Press on.
		default:
			return false
		}
	}
	switch in.Stack.Text() {
	case "define":

</p>

<p>
The most important thing to know about Go's assembler is that it is not a direct representation of the underlying machine.
Some of the details map precisely to the machine, but some do not.
This is because the compiler suite (see
<a href="https://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html">this description</a>)
needs no assembler pass in the usual pipeline.
Instead, the compiler operates on a kind of semi-abstract instruction set,

func (fi headerFileInfo) String() string {
	return fs.FormatFileInfo(fi)
}

// FileInfoHeader creates a partially-populated [FileHeader] from an
// fs.FileInfo.
// Because fs.FileInfo's Name method returns only the base name of
// the file it describes, it may be necessary to modify the Name field
// of the returned header to provide the full path name of the file.

// having zero bytes. As such, the encoding and decoding logic in this package
// deals with sparseDatas.
//
// However, the external API uses sparseHoles instead of sparseDatas because the
// zero value of sparseHoles logically represents a normal file (i.e., there are
// no holes in it). On the other hand, the zero value of sparseDatas implies
// that the file has no data in it, which is rather odd.
//

		// building. They are used to mark duplicate entries.
		files := make(map[string]int)
		knownDirs := make(map[string]int)

		// dirs[name] is true if name is known to be a directory,
		// because it appears as a prefix in a path.
		dirs := make(map[string]bool)

		for _, file := range r.File {
			isDir := len(file.Name) > 0 && file.Name[len(file.Name)-1] == '/'
			name := toValidName(file.Name)

			// Experiments (using IndexPeriodic) suggest
			// the cutover is about 16 byte skips.
			// TODO: if large prefixes of sep are matching
			// we should cutover at even larger average skips,
			// because Equal becomes that much more expensive.
			// This code does not take that effect into account.
			j := bytealg.IndexRabinKarp(s[i:], sep)
			if j < 0 {
				return -1
			}
			return i + j
		}
	}

	if !fh.Modified.IsZero() {
		// Contrary to the FileHeader.SetModTime method, we intentionally
		// do not convert to UTC, because we assume the user intends to encode
		// the date using the specified timezone. A user may want this control
		// because many legacy ZIP readers interpret the timestamp according
		// to the local timezone.
		//
		// The timezone is only non-UTC if a user directly sets the Modified