Brief
Although Go releases are incremental and follow the Go compatibility promise: unless the change is required for a bug or security fix, the version starting with 1 won’t experience any backward-breaking change to the language or standard library, you can have a reason to use an old version of the language.
Is there a clean way to do this?
Recommendation
I recommend a tool like go version manager that helps to manage a systemwide version of the language. The advantage of this is the easy it comes with. A simple gvm use 1.22, would ensure the 1.2 version of the langugage is installed system-wide.
Optimal Solution
A better approach is not to compromise the global Go installation but to run a specific code with a specific version of Go installation and discard the installation once done. Go supports this easily.
To do this, firstly, use the go get command to download a specific version of the language as a package:
go get golang.org/dl/go1.22.3
The above command would download an executable named after the version. Now, use the executable to issue a final command that would do the setup.
go1.22.3 download
Once this is done, use the named executable(go1.22.3) to run go commands, example:
go1.22.3 run main.go
Cleanup
Cleaning up the installation is the same as deleting the installation from the filesystem. The command go1.22.3 env GOROOT reveals the installation folder for the version of the go executable, now use rm command to delete it.
rm -rf $(go1.22.3 env GOROOT)
Finally, the system wide go installation, go1.22.3 is a package that has an executable, remove the installed executable with the command:
rm $(go env GOPATH)/bin/go1.22.3