[benesch]

> Remember there already is a mature C compiler alternative for Go: gccgo. There's also already a first-party LLVM based Go toolchain created by Google (gollvm). Whatever hypothetical benefits you might presume would emerge from this kind of synergy already exist. But the community mostly isn't interested.

I suspect the community is uninterested because it’s hard to be interested in compilers that a) compile slower than gc, and b) produce slower code than gc. That's a worse compiler on all fronts!

For gccgo or gollvm to be useful, they need to provide some benefit. I suspect we'll see (b) fixed within a year. GCC/LLVM have far more optimizations than gc, and so it's mostly a matter of plumbing enough information from the Go frontend into the LLVM optimizer to unleash its full power.

I don't expect we'll see (a) fixed, unless something changes at Google.

> Also, Google also already invests a massive amount of resource into LLVM. In fact, the principal author of LLVM and Clang works at Google. But even when he was at Apple they were already shoveling resource into the project.

Yes, but Chris Lattner is not actively working on speeding up LLVM. His big project lately has been supporting TensorFlow via MLIR.