Google To Go After Go-One In GCC 4.7 Compiler

Google shared their intentions this week to incorporate version 1 of the Go programming language into the forthcoming GCC 4.7 release.

Google's Go was originally announced in 2009 and reached a production status in 2010, but in 2012 only version 1.0 of the language is being readied. Go version 1 will be a stable, long-term release with no language or API changes. This forthcoming specification is described in this Google document.

Ian Lance Taylor at Google has shared his desire of having Go v1 in GCC 4.7. Go was sent into GCC 4.6 already, but Google is just concerned about making sure this long-term version 1 support makes it into next release -- GCC 4.7.

Ian Lance Taylor wrote in a GCC mailing list message, "My goal with gccgo is to include a complete Go 1 implementation with the gcc 4.7 release. Therefore, I plan to continue to patch the code in gcc/go and libgo. There shouldn't be any major changes, but there will be various minor ones. Since this code is only built optionally, it should not affect the rest of the release process."

GCC 4.7 is expected for release around April. There's already some early benchmarks for those interested in the performance of the GNU Compiler Collection. Some of the other features of GCC 4.7 are documented here, but in another upcoming article I will talk about other recent developments.