proposal: all: remove GOARM=5

[rsc]

Should we remove GOARM=5? It doesn't have modern atomics nor floating point, so we have to rely on the OS (Linux only) to provide atomic operations, and we use software floating point, which is slow. On the other hand it is a small amount of code to keep running and not causing active problems for us that I'm aware of, so if there are ongoing uses, it's probably fine to keep.

I expect this proposal to be declined. I am filing it to collect information about existing GOARM=5 uses.

[cuonglm]

I'm leaning to keep GOARM=5 at this moment.

Recently, I got a router with armv7 chip but without hard floating support. Running GOARM=5 in this router is the only option we have.

Control-D-Inc/ctrld#12

[dolmen]

Another active use case for GOARM=5: the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 platform is still actively used by an Open Source community despites LEGO has stopped selling it in June 2021.

ev3dev is a Debian/Linux distribution for the EV3. GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=5 CGO_ENABLED=0 allows to cross-compile to target that environment.

[rsc]

This proposal has been added to the active column of the proposals project
and will now be reviewed at the weekly proposal review meetings.
— rsc for the proposal review group

[xhit]

Another active use case for GOARM=5: we have a private software called Dixer https://dixer.stgo.do and some that is used actively in SMS gateways from OpenVox https://openvox.cn/ to update some data.

[rsc]

Based on the discussion above, this proposal seems like a likely decline.
— rsc for the proposal review group

[rsc]

No change in consensus, so declined.
— rsc for the proposal review group