A working go 1.23 compiler for Windows 7 (32 bit/386).
As we all know, Golang team dropped the support for Windows 7 since Go 1.21. This decision is up to the developers and given Win7 is past EOL, it has solid reasoning. However some people cannot buy a fancy PC that'll support a modern OS; others don't upgrade for a different reason, so this is how the project is born.
This project is eternally in the pre-alpha, 'works on my machine' state because the (simple) idea behind it is all about reverting some commits that prevent Go from running on Windows 7, which obviously means no one can guarantee it works correctly (or works at all), can produce a working code that behaves as you expect or provide any security. When I state it works it means it does on my dev box, for my use cases, at the time I built it.
It is being tested on Windows 7 Ultimate edition SP1 32 bit (Version 6.1.7601) with only few selected updates applied (their number is limited so the system could be considered almost clean). For testing cgo I use:
gcc version 14.2.0 (MinGW-W64 i686-msvcrt-posix-dwarf, built by Brecht Sanders, r2)The toolchain/compiler can compile itself and works for my pet projects. Cross-compilation also works, at least for Linux/amd64 target (cgo untested).
On commit ad87d4404782d816f7a4497113b6b983b45aa442. Moving forward doesn't help much, since the number of reverted commits form a snowball effect that prevents merging almost any change or makes it useless. The approach of this repo is not very smart, it would be better to write patches that would actually handle functions unsupported by Win7 instead of simply reverting them, but I lack time and expertise to implement this. You can see full reversion list here.
It does not pass tests, but neither does unmodified official go git repo when compiled (I believe), so I removed them from run.bat for the better good and to save some time.
This produces a working go tree, ready to point GOROOT to. The build script is tested only on github CI because it performs some hefty jobs (builds go like 3 times) and running it locally is not very practical, anyways it should work. You can greb a prebuilt version on releases page (release version tags have nothing to do with golang versioning and are created merely to upload the packages). They can be obtained from artifacts of action runs as well.
In conclusion, this is an emergency mechanism for people using legacy hardware/OS to still be able to utilize a modern language. Moving forward with it will be hard and unproductive since new changes will not make their way due to aforementioned number of reverting commits. It will be easier to just alter version file and hope that Go's backward compatibility will remain long enough. Happy coding!
Use the project wherever you want, if you dare. Again, no guarantees. Please don't use this anywhere it can put human lives at risk or cause significant damage. Don't claim you're the author.