It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
It's very important for both the compiler tools chains of go to continue working well for redundancy and feature design validation purposes. However, I'm generally curious -- do people / organizations use gcc-go for some use cases ?
I assume it will follow gjc footsteps if no one steps up for maintenance.
GCC has a high bar for having frontends added into the standar distribution, and if there isn't a viable reason why they should be kept around, they get eventually removed.
What kept gcj around for so many years, after being almost left for dead, was that it was the only frontend project that had unit tests for specific compilation scenarios.
Eventually someone took the effort to migrate those tests, and remove gcj.
It has it's niche uses, such as compiling Go for lesser used architectures. It's a bit awkward to not have full language capabilities, but it still feels nicer than writing C/C++.
> GCC Go does not support generics, so it's currently not very useful.
I don't think a single one of the Go programs I use (or have written) use generics. If generics is the only sticking point, then that doesn't seem to be much of a problem at all.
> You’re also at the mercy of the libraries you use, no?
To a certain extent. No one says you must use the, presumably newer, version of a library using generics or even use libraries at all. Although for any non-trivial program this is probably not how things are going to shake out for you.
> Which likely makes this an increasingly niche case?
This assumes that dependencies in general will on average converge on using generics. If your assertion is that this is the case, I'm going to have to object on the basis that there are a great many libraries out there today that were feature-complete before generics existed and therefore are effectively only receiving bug fix updates, no retrofit of generics in sight. And there is no rule that dictates all new libraries being written _must_ use generics.
I just used them today to sort a list of browser releases by their publication date. They're not universal hammers but sometimes you do encounter something nail shaped that they're great at.
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
[0]: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS