[benesch]

I spent six weeks, unpaid, at the Recurse Center this year hacking on gccgo to see if I could improve the situation. I didn't get very far—it's hard! And I don't have much experience with compilers. So, truly, I did as much as my finances could reasonably support. (I did manage to write up a blog post about where specifically gccgo needs the most work [0].)

I did learn enough in those six weeks to feel comfortable asserting that there is incredible potential in gccgo/gollvm, and that I think Google is making a mistake by continuing to invest so heavily in the gc toolchain.

[0]: http://meltware.com/2019/01/16/gccgo-benchmarks-2019.html

[azylman]

If you're going to rely on personal experience in an argument, "in six weeks I learned enough to criticize many engineers with decades of experience" is not a strong argument. That's not even claiming to be a 10x engineer, that's claiming to be a 1000x engineer.

I don't intend this to sound harsh, apologies if it does. I strongly recommend you introspect on your own confidence and experience levels. I've mentored a lot of junior engineers with similar viewpoints and often there's a lot of hidden complexity they simply lack the experience to understand.

This isn't to say you should take everything anyone with more experience says at blind faith, simply that dismissing without understanding is counter to a growth mentality.

[benesch]

I invoked the personal experience only as evidence that I did what (little) I could to push along the project that I think has the most long term potential. I'm not criticizing without at least trying to do what I can.

In short, the reasons gccgo produces worse code than gc are the result of fairly basic optimizations that are/were missing. For example, open-coding string slicing [0] and string equality [1] is enough to close the gap in the TimeParse benchmark in the blog post above. In fact, with those changes, gccgo actually produces better code than gc, because the full power of GCC can be unleashed on the IR, and GCC has more aggressive optimizations than gc.

> This isn't to say you should take everything anyone with more experience says at blind faith, simply that dismissing without understanding is counter to a growth mentality.

Quite honestly, I think you're more guilty of dismissing without understanding than I am. It's true that I haven't been programming for decades, but I've spent two years dealing with the Go toolchain's shortcomings on a large Go project, and six weeks specifically on a passion project to improve gccgo. Of course it's possible that I'm wrong! But I've spent a while thinking about it, and often just as relevant as experience is a fresh, outside perspective. It's easy for a team to get stuck in tunnel vision or groupthink.

[0]: https://github.com/golang/gofrontend/commit/62e3a8cc0a862b0a... [1]: https://github.com/golang/gofrontend/commit/89b442a0100286ee...