

Go compiler now committed to gcc mainline (to be gcc 4.6) - adulau
http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thread/200979c143e959fc?pli=1

======
andrewf
More information here: <http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/448>

~~~
junkbit
"Release gccgo in gcc is going to introduce a difficulty for Go programmers
who use it. The Go language continues to evolve, but gcc 4.6 will not. That
means that people using gcc 4.6 will be using a language which will be
increasingly out of date. I don’t think there is any way to avoid that problem
at this stage. The language will become more stable over time."

------
joubert
Why bother with GCC when the medium to long term seems to favor the LLVM
compiler infrastructure? (and yes, I know you can use GCC together with LLVM,
but for example, in Apple's case, XCode 4 now favors LLVM+Clang instead of the
LLVM+GCC setup of XCode 3)

~~~
pbiggar
In this particular case:

    
    
      - Go is created by google
      - Ian Lance Taylor, the author of gccgo, works for Google
      - Taylor has worked on gcc for more than a decade
      - Google uses gcc for all its infrastructure
    

I doubt they would object to an LLVM front-end, and I'm sure someone will
create one in the future.

As to why Google doesn't use LLVM, the generated code is simply not as fast as
GCC. Google (last I heard) employs about 30 compiler engineers to support gcc
internally, so they're not about to switch over to a less mature platform,
even though it shows great potential.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
From Ars:

 _I was initially a bit surprised that Google chose not to use the Low-Level
Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler framework—it has a lot of LLVM expertise
internally and is using it extensively for their awesome Python optimization
effort. Pike says that LLVM was considered during the early stages of the Go
project, but its compile-time performance was judged to be inadequate._

[http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/go-new-
open-...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/go-new-open-source-
programming-language-from-google.ars)

~~~
pbiggar
Interesting. Google uses gcc for all its C++ code internally, and I would say
that it has way more gcc expertise internally than LLVM. I heard some figures
once that each extra percent of performance they get out of gcc is worth $1m
dollars per product, for each of their 10 most important products. I think
that's per year. (eg a 4% improvement in the speed of gcc-compiled code would
save them $40m a year).

------
pieter
Anyone else has the problem that they need to log in with a Google account
before being able to see posts on Google Groups? I even have this on the group
I created, which I set to the most public settings.

~~~
masklinn
That seems to be if you're logged in an other Google service in the same
browser/session: if I open a browser I only use for development (and not for
personal stuff, so it's not logged into any Google service) such as Opera, I
get the message. On the other hand if I open the link in my "usual" browser it
asks me to log into Google Groups (if I'm not already logged into it)

------
Vidura
So why didn't java and python made it to gcc ?

~~~
pmjordan
I'm trying to work out at what level your question makes sense. I'm unaware of
a GCC-based Python compiler, so surely there's nothing to merge there?

As for Java: <http://gcc.gnu.org/java/> (this has been in for _years_ )

~~~
froydnj
There was a SoC project for a Python front-end to GCC this past summer. I
don't know how far it got.

