Hyrum’s Law in Golang

Hyrum's Law is one of those observations that's certainly useful, but be careful not to fixate on it and draw the wrong conclusions. Consider that even the total runtime of a function is an observable property, which means that optimizing a function to make it faster is a breaking change (what if suddenly one of your queues clears too fast and triggers a deadlock??), despite the fact that 99.99999999% of your users would probably appreciate having code that runs faster for no effort on their part.

Therefore it's unavoidable that what constitutes a "breaking change" is a social contract, not a technical contract, because the alternative is that literally nothing is ever allowed to change. So as a library author, document what parts of your API are guaranteed not to change, be reasonable, and have empathy for your users. And as a library consumer, understand that making undocumented interfaces into load-bearing constructs is done at your own risk, and have empathy for the library authors.

That used to be a problem in the 1980s. Thus PCs came with a turbo button to slow them down, and 8 bit computers went the entire decade without upgrading their speed even though faster CPUs were available. These days nearly everything runs on more than one CPU and so nobody relies on function runtime (other than is if fast enough). Even in embedded they have been burned by their one CPU going out of production and so try to avoid that dependency because it cannot be relied on anymore.

I found a used copy of Warcraft III and found it was unplayable because the scrolling algorithm ran as fast as possible with no minimum time. Any map bigger than 2x2 screens you could not scroll to the middle.