gofrontend

If the Go compiler was twice as fast, I wouldn't really notice. If the Go linker was twice as fast, that would be a minor convenience, sometimes. I wouldn't expect much more that twice, maybe thrice at the very outside. And it'd be a long journey to get there with bugs and such to work through. The blow-your-socks-off improvements come from when you start with scripting languages. Go may be among the slower compiled languages, but it's still a compiled language with performance in the compiled-language class; there's not a factor of 10 or 20 sitting on the table. But having another implementation could be useful on its own merits. I haven't heard much about gccgo lately, though the project [1] seems to be getting commits still. A highly-compatible Go compiler that also did a lot of compile-time optimizations, the sort of code that may be

Aside: the go team maintains frontends for gcc and llvm, though not targeting microcontrollers like this. https://github.com/golang/gofrontend https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/

Aside: this is one thing I found interesting about go. They maintain one compiler and two front ends: llvm: https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/ gcc: https://github.com/golang/gofrontend Go: https://github.com/golang/go/tree/master/src/cmd/compile And I believe all three are maintained by the go team. It should be noted that the LLVM implementation is used by tinygo: https://tinygo.org/

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. Qui

golang uses a handwritten recursive decent parser and handwritten lexer. https://github.com/golang/gofrontend/blob/master/go/parse.cc https://github.com/golang/gofrontend/blob/master/go/lex.cc I can't think of a single major tool that uses ANTLR or bison. I say that being a huge ANTLR fan. Parser/lexer generators are really easy to use for DSLs but for real languages and tools, they're too heavyweight and constraining.