A Go Front-End Could Soon Be Landing In LLVM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Go Front-End Could Soon Be Landing In LLVM

The "llgo" Go front-end to LLVM could soon be accepted as a new sub-project. This Go front-end is written in the Go language itself...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg0NjM

[Drago]

This is exciting! Is there any benchmarks comparing compile and running speed against `gc` and `gccgo`?

[curaga]

How does one build it if it's written in go?

[tessio]

How does one build it if it's written in go?

I have the same question..

[geearf]

How does one build it if it's written in go?

llgo requires:

Go 1.3 or later.

It's the same as for a C compiler I suppose.

[Skrapion]

It's called self-hosting.

[Daktyl198]

How does one build it if it's written in go?

You build it with either (A) the official Go compiler or (B) with a previous build of llgo

Rust is also self-hosting on top of LLVM, so think of this project as something similar on top of that setup.

[curaga]

It's called self-hosting.

Nope, self-hosting has nothing to do with the chicken-egg problem. Being able to build itself is neat, but you need to get the first build up somehow.

This then brings all the issues about trusting trust if you have to install a Go compiler from binaries somewhere.

[Skrapion]

Self-hosting is the term used to describe a compiler written in the same language it's compiling. The link I gave addresses the chicken and egg problem.

[mr_tawan]

There's already a compiler for go. The new compiler just has been written in go and use the existing compiler to compile.

And also it's not really an egg-or-chicken kind of problem. When you're starting off a new language, a compiler must be written in some other language first. If you write the compiler in that language first, then it could not be compile as there is no mechanism to compile that code to something runnable on computer. Remember a compiler is also a computer program too. Even assembler has to be first written in machine language (and there's no translation/compilation of code written in machine language. It's already in the binary format so it does not need a compiler.). Once you have a compiler you can then create another compiler using the language the compiler aimed to compile.