

Gccgo in GCC 4.7.1 - fss
http://blog.golang.org/2012/07/gccgo-in-gcc-471.html

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squires
Anyone have any insight as to how Go will avoid the garbage collection latency
issues that arise in some situations with other GC languages, such as those
that run on the JVM or CLR? I ask this in particular since Go is frequently
mentioned as a C++ alternative.

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kkowalczyk
An "alternative" doesn't mean "has to be as good or better at everything that
C++ does".

Most programs don't have garbage collection latency issues. Look at Android or
Windows Phone - all the user-level apps are written in garbage-collected
language and they work just fine.

Look at web - all the interaction is written in JavaScript and Gmail works
just fine.

At this point in the discussion people usually bring "real time" applications.
Approximately no-one writes those applications.

Go is an alternative to C++ in the sense that many (but not all) programs that
you had to write in C++ you can now write in Go.

~~~
VMG
> Look at Android or Windows Phone - all the user-level apps are written in
> garbage-collected language and they work just fine.

Aren't there people blaming Android's perceived laggyness on this?

~~~
pjmlp
Many do, but actually the problem is caused by UI using software rendering
instead of the GPU. This was only changed in Android 3.0.

Another thing is that many developers do too much in the UI thread instead of
doing it in the background or asynchronously.

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cpeterso
Any word on an LLVM frontend for go?

Andrew Wilkins has written llgo, a compiler for Go, written in Go, and using
the LLVM compiler infrastructure: <https://github.com/axw/llgo/#readme>

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genwin
I didn't know this info, about the other compiler. That's great. Near the end
of a project I'll try gccgo to see what performance difference it makes. The
testing package makes profiling relatively easy.

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rasur
I'm pleased that gccgo provides support for architectures outside of x86 and
ARM, this is good news.

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rabbitfang
Go feels to me like it is trying to combine C and Python. Much more efficient
than Python, but not as efficient as C. Much more expressive than C, but not
as expressive as Python. I can't quite decide if that's combining the best of
both worlds, or compromising on both fronts.

What's up with the official Go binaries being incompatible with RHEL 5? I
might have another look in about a decade or so.

~~~
enneff
> What's up with the official Go binaries being incompatible with RHEL 5? I
> might have another look in about a decade or so.

Go runs on RHEL 5.2 and above (released in May 2008, and there have been 7
further point releases since). If you REALLY want to run it on 5.1 and have
gcc then you can build your own Go tool chain in about 2 minutes.

Your whole post is FUD. You don't know anything about Go yet offer a negative
assessment. Why bother?

~~~
rabbitfang
Fact: C is faster than Go:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=go&lang2=gcc)

Fact: Python is more expressive than Go (less code):

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=go&lang2=python3)

If I wasn't interested in Go I wouldn't complain about not having binaries.
You may not be running RHEL 5.0 but there are many organizations which still
have many systems on it. It's not always up to Joe Developer to decide to
upgrade the OS on every box in an organization. Perhaps I need to know more
about building go to compile my own binaries, but not having to deal with C is
one of the reason's I was looking at Go in the first place.

How is this FUD? C is faster than Go, Python takes less code than Go and the
binaries don't support RHEL 5.0. I thought my post wasn't particularly biased,
but I'm pretty shocked at the reaction I got :(

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kev009
There is compound failure at your organization as running _5.0_ is reckless
and dangerous.

~~~
rabbitfang
You do realise that security patches are still being provided for even RHEL 3?
<https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rhel3els-errata.html>

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juan_juarez
Is this an indication of community support & language acceptance, or simply
Google throwing mountains of money at the project?

~~~
luriel
The original work ongccgo was done by Ian Lance Taylor(of the gold linker
fame) who works at Google, and now is being accepted and supported by the GCC
project.

So the answer to your question is: both.

