[LLVMdev] Google's Go

[Jon Harrop]

On Thursday 12 November 2009 18:59:51 Owen Anderson wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Edward O'Callaghan wrote:
> > No, its up to them which backend they want to use.
> > Sounds like they think that GCC is super quick compared to LLVM. Looks
> > like another fud fart out of google to me.
>
> Actually, after chatting with Ian about it, it's more of a case of the FAQ
> being poorly worded than them being anti-LLVM.
>
> If you read it closely, it says that LLVM was too slow for 6g, which is
> their ultra-fast, non-optimizing implementation based on the Plan9
> compilers.

Indeed:

  "We also considered using LLVM for 6g but we felt it was too large and slow 
to meet our performance goals." - 
http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Implementation

> In this case, the assertion that LLVM is slow is correct: it's 
> definitely slower than a non-optimizing compiler.

I'm *very* surprised by this and will test it myself...

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e