Google's Go Has Been Called To Go Into GCC 4.6

Last year one of the many projects introduced by Google was the Go programming language. Do you remember? It's reached a state of being a production-ready language, at least within Google's confines, but this project hasn't received as much attention and interest by the Linux and open-source communities as some of their other work such as VP8 and their new container format. It's possible that this could change once the Go programming language is accessible to more developers, which may very well come with GCC 4.6.

Google's Ian Lance Taylor has initiated a discussion on the GCC mailing list about merging the Go front-end into the mainline code-base for the GNU Compiler Collection. In January of this year the GCC steering committee approved the Go programming language for integration into GCC (e-mail message), but it didn't happen for GCC 4.5, except now it looks like it might happen with GCC 4.6.

Ian of Google, who will be the GCC Go manager, is wanting to push this code into GCC 4.6 as it's in a state almost ready to be merged -- there's just a few Go-specific things to take care of still.

GCC 4.6 should be released sometime in 2011.