Brad Fitzpatrick

> Don't some operating systems (depending on security policy) throw a confirmation dialog when attempting to listen on any interface other than the loopback? Yes, the loopback listen (for both...

I think the real problem is that `SupportsIPv6` isn't defined well enough. It says: > SupportsIPv6 reports whether the platform supports IPv6 networking functionality. Does that mean? * has a...

> I'd prefer to take up @josharian's first suggestion and not have the standard library promote the concept. What about `const IsBigEndian = false` in `x/sys/cpu`? That's not the standard...

> And just to throw out more ideas...another option for exposing a useful constant directly via encoding/binary could be to give nativeEndian (and bigEndian and littleEndian?) an IsLittleEndian/IsLittle method that...

> Would it be correct to say that you mean something like: if there are no references to any exported names of this package, then there is no need to...

> How do you end up with those kinds of if false statements in production code in general? They arise in a dozen different ways. That was just an example...

@rsc, here's a more concrete example distilled from above. `crypto/x509` imports `crypto/md5`, but only because the never-used-in-std `x509.EncryptPEMBlock` might use it. If you don't use `EncryptPEMBlock`, the linker can GC...

> Are side effects from indirectly-imported packages covered by the Go 1 compatibility promise? No clear rule either way. I'm sure we've even already broken it in the past without...

> Is this a real problem, though? I doubt it. I've had to deal with it at least twice. net/http had hangs when people panicked with nil. @mpvl was talking...

@go101, eliminating code like that would be an added bonus.