[LLVMdev] Proposal: add Go frontend subproject based on llgo

[Alex Rosenberg]

I must profess a dislike for the trend of corporate languages-as-platforms that appears to have spawned the Go project, along with several other recent languages. Based on the disaster Oracle has made of Java, I think that having a single corporation behind a language and not working toward standardization is not a healthy sign.

That you are working on a properly-licensed open source frontend is a great start in a positive direction. I want to understand more about Go in order to understand the issues that will come from integrating this frontend. Put another way -- this is an opportunity for you to evangelize the language, teaching us old C fuddy-duddies all about Go and why it deserves our attention. What is it being used for? How widespread is the adoption? Is there some TL;DR reading out there we should focus our time on? Is there an equivalent of Gary Berhardt's excellent WAT presentation that addresses the gotchas in the language design that we should also be aware of?

Alex

On Nov 19, 2014, at 1:53 PM, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to propose the contribution of a Go frontend subproject to the LLVM
> project, based on the existing llgo project at https://github.com/go-llvm/llgo .
> As with the previous contribution of the Go bindings, I have obtained
> permission from all llgo contributors whose code is part of this contribution,
> to contribute their changes to the LLVM project and relicense their changes
> under the LLVM license. I am also willing to be the code owner for the
> llgo subproject.
> 
> The frontend would live in the LLVM svn repository and if checked out into
> tools/llgo would build as part of the regular LLVM build (with CMake only). We
> would be keeping llgo compatible with top-of-tree LLVM, although I imagine
> this would be less burdensome than the other subprojects as llgo is written
> in Go and depends on the Go bindings previously contributed to LLVM.
> 
> llgo depends on certain third-party components, namely a copy of the Go
> standard library (libgo), a Go program analysis library (go.tools) and two
> library dependencies of the standard library (libbacktrace and libffi). These
> would be mirrored into the llgo repository under a third_party directory. They
> would retain their original licenses, which are BSD and GPLv3 with Runtime
> Library Exception (the latter only applies to a handful of header files;
> eventually we would seek to replace these).
> 
> As a first step, I have published:
> 
> http://reviews.llvm.org/D6327
> 
> with the initial code contribution. The mirrored third-party sources will be
> added later, as the diff would be too large to review. If there is consensus
> in the community, the next step I propose to take is to create the subproject
> in svn and check in the initial version of the code.
> 
> Any comments on this contribution are appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> -- 
> Peter
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