[sudhirj]

Preventing stagnation and maintaining backwards compatibility aren’t the same thing. Go has a very strong backwards compatibility guarantee, and since they made the guarantee the entire compiler has been rewritten and there have been plenty of additions to stdlib.

[contingencies]

Yes, it's possible just not usual to replace everything without effecting interfaces.

[riffraff]

but gems in stdlib work fine even for that: if the next version of the gem breaks compatibility the next version of ruby is free to import it, and you can keep using the old interface with new ruby by locking the dependency to the old gem version.