LLVM's Go Front-End Was Finally Dropped From The Official Source Tree

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 17 February 2020 at 03:46 PM EST. 16 Comments
LLVM
Most probably didn't even realize LLVM had a Go language front-end, but this past week it was dropped from the official source mono repository.

This LLVM Go front-end "LLGO" hasn't been maintained in several years and never really took off... Most probably aren't even aware of this Go compiler support for LLVM. So the code has been suffering, it was stuck at Go version 1.5 well behind the latest upstream, it likely has build errors, and there are other nuisances with the code like having an entire copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" novel. For those wondering why an entire novel was part of the source tree, it amounted to serving as a compression test case.

Should anyone step up to revive LLGO, it can be reverted or there is also external LLGO copies. But at least as far as the official LLVM source tree is concerned, LLGO is removed. However, more than likely any future LLVM Go implementation would involve a complete rewrite as opposed to reviving this old code-base, similar to what we've seen out of the improving Fortran compiler front-end support.

Stripping out the defunct LLGO shortened up the code-base by 729,809 lines.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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