[ale] Compiling Go

[Ed Cashin]

I should say that "Ken Thomson"-ish is a compliment when I say it.  It's
just that not everyone can think like Ken Thompson.


On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:

> There was a recent podcast (changelog, perhaps?) where Andrew Gerrand
> discussed this aspect of Go 1.5.
>
> The original Go toolchain was written in C by Ken Thompson (yes, the
> UNIX-writing peer of Dennis Ritchie) based on the toolchain from plan9.  It
> was great to have a C-based toolchain while the Go language was changing.
>
> Now that Go is stabilizing, and to help people contribute to improvements
> in the toolchain, it's helpful to move from the very Ken-Thompson-ish C
> toolchain to one that's more friendly to general collaboration.  So Rob
> Pike wrote a C to Go translator and ran the compiler through it.
>
> That resulted in a working but very ugly (one single package, and not
> idiomatic) Go program.  They incrementally made it more Go-like over the
> course of a while, and they wound up with the version in Go 1.5.
>
> You can use Go 1.4 and build it from scratch if you have a C compiler.
>
> They mentioned the fact that gcc goes through multiple bootstrap stages to
> ensure that it can be built with minimal assumptions about the toolchain
> that is used to build gcc.  They don't have something like that in Go, but
> you can use Go 1.4.  They'll never create a toolchain that Go 1.4 cannot
> build.
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Chris Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com
> > wrote:
>
>> I'm playing with accessing my Google Drive from Linux via CLI.  That
>> works so now I'm looking at compiling Go from source.
>>
>> What I don't understand is "You need Go to compile Go"
>>
>> I guess you do need gcc to compile gcc.  You compile gcc then use it to
>> compile itself.
>>
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>
>
> --
>   Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
>



-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
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