[evmar]

I read somewhere (but I can't think of the keywords to find it now) that they found the greater flexibility in owning their toolchain was worth the cost. For example they changed their data layout for GC purposes and changed the segmented stack approach over the course of their development and had they been tied to LLVM or gcc they'd have spent much of their time fighting against those implementations, or politicing to convince the maintainers to add additional complexity to their systems for an unproven langauge. (My example is weak because I am trying to retell their reasons and my recollection is vague.) I think they still haven't succeeded in bringing gcc up to par with their current approach.

[pcwalton]

LLVM supports precise GC now via the late safepoint placement infrastructure [1]. This infrastructure should be sufficient to support both the copying stacks and a precise GC.

This is a recent addition and did not exist at the time Go was created, however.

[1]: http://llvm.org/docs/Statepoints.html

[seryoiupfurds]

Are you thinking of this comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817990

[evmar]

That's the one, thanks!