From the proposal:

"There is one last, special wildcard: {$} matches only the end of the URL, allowing writing a pattern that ends in slash but does not match all extensions of that path. For example, the pattern /{$} matches the root page / but (unlike the pattern / today) does not match a request for /anythingelse."

Ahhh how did I miss that!!

That is amazing. Goodbye gorilla mux.

Ideally, this should be the default behavior, i.e. "/foo/" matching only "/foo/" and nothing else. And if one wants a prefix they should be able to explicitly spell it out like "/foo/{**}".

But that’s not backwards-compatible, sadly, so this is going to remain a historical wart.

I would say that unless specified differently this bit of the documentation[1] still applies (second paragraph):

> Longer patterns take precedence over shorter ones,

https://pkg.go.dev/net/http#ServeMux

No, it does not. The length of the pattern isn't important anymore, only whether it overlaps with other patterns.

That would be a breaking API change in my opinion. I bet you the length criterion will still apply for path patterns that don't include placeholders, even if not specifically mentioned in the proposal.

[edit] Heh, I guess you'd know better. :D The comparison between the hn username and github username resolved favourably in the end. :P

As the other person says, how comes it is not a backwards incompatible change?