[binarycrusader]

Having worked on the Go port for SPARC with another person (don't know if it was ever completed), I have to agree with the parent here. The implementation of Go itself (based on 1.5-1.8 when I worked on it) was actually very complex. Large swaths of the codebase were completely uncommented and much of the knowledge about how the system is intended to work resides in the heads of the core Go team.

[arcticbull]

If only y’all could have just used llvm

[pcwalton]

For what it's worth, LLVM would have made precise moving GC hard. (Though Go 6g/8g still doesn't have moving GC, which is unfortunate.) For that reason, I'm not certain that LLVM would have been the best decision in the long term, though it would have made Go code faster in the short term.

In my view, if Cranelift had been around when Go was announced, it would have been the clear best choice over LLVM, due to compile times and relative simplicity allowing for easy modifications to add things like precise moving GC and moving stacks.

[littlestymaar]

> In my view, if Cranelift had been around when Go was announced

Too bad cranelift is written in a language which wasn't even invented when Go was announced ^^.

[pjmlp]

Yes, because we all enjoy waiting for a compiler to get its work done, while keeping the myth alive that either C or C++ are required to write compilers.

[binarycrusader]

To be clear, I've never been a Go team member -- I was a community member working on a port with another person.

[Volt]

That wouldn't have fixed the complexity.