[sidkshatriya]

It's very important for both the compiler tools chains of go to continue working well for redundancy and feature design validation purposes. However, I'm generally curious -- do people / organizations use gcc-go for some use cases ?

[fweimer]

GCC Go does not support generics, so it's currently not very useful.

[pjmlp]

I assume it will follow gjc footsteps if no one steps up for maintenance.

GCC has a high bar for having frontends added into the standar distribution, and if there isn't a viable reason why they should be kept around, they get eventually removed.

What kept gcj around for so many years, after being almost left for dead, was that it was the only frontend project that had unit tests for specific compilation scenarios.

Eventually someone took the effort to migrate those tests, and remove gcj.

[flakes]

It has it's niche uses, such as compiling Go for lesser used architectures. It's a bit awkward to not have full language capabilities, but it still feels nicer than writing C/C++.

[necheffa]

> GCC Go does not support generics, so it's currently not very useful.

I don't think a single one of the Go programs I use (or have written) use generics. If generics is the only sticking point, then that doesn't seem to be much of a problem at all.

[pbh101]

You’re also at the mercy of the libraries you use, no? Which likely makes this an increasingly niche case?

[necheffa]

> You’re also at the mercy of the libraries you use, no?

To a certain extent. No one says you must use the, presumably newer, version of a library using generics or even use libraries at all. Although for any non-trivial program this is probably not how things are going to shake out for you.

> Which likely makes this an increasingly niche case?

This assumes that dependencies in general will on average converge on using generics. If your assertion is that this is the case, I'm going to have to object on the basis that there are a great many libraries out there today that were feature-complete before generics existed and therefore are effectively only receiving bug fix updates, no retrofit of generics in sight. And there is no rule that dictates all new libraries being written _must_ use generics.

[xena]

I just used them today to sort a list of browser releases by their publication date. They're not universal hammers but sometimes you do encounter something nail shaped that they're great at.