| > being able to throw money and people at LLVM development doesn't explain why it's still much slower than the Go compiler toolchain. Right, you need to specifically throw money and people at the problem of making LLVM faster, not just at LLVM in general. Neither Swift nor Objective-C have "fast compiles" as part of their pitch. Much of the work on LLVM goes into producing the highest quality object code possible, which is a goal often at odds with compiling quickly, and part of the reason the choose-your-optimization-level flag (-O) exists, though -O0 compiles are still not fast enough. > In hindsight the Go team made the right call to use their own toolchain. No, we don't have the benefit of hindsight yet. We don't know what could have been if the resources that had been spent on the Go toolchain had been spent on LLVM instead. If five highly-qualified engineers spent five years trying to speed up gollvm compiles without success, we'd have strong evidence that something about LLVM prohibits the fast compiles that are possible with the gc toolchain. But that's not the situation. |