undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbentcorner13y ago0 comments

> It's all well and good writing Go's compiler in Go, but then how are you going to compile it? A language needs to reach a certain threshold before it becomes possible to write a compiler in it's own language.

Is Go not at this point yet? I only have casual knowledge of the language, but it sure sounds like it is capable of building itself.

0 comments

9 comments · 6 top-level

awj13y ago· 3 in thread

Considering people are writing web servers and all sorts of other things in it, I'm sure it's suitable for writing a compiler. Technically all you really need is logic, some data structures, and low level file I/O. If you're going to spit out asm and let someone else deal with that, then all you need is normal file I/O.

It seems like Go is trying to capitalize on the momentum they have. Improvements to the language are still coming quickly. I'd be surprised if a self-hosting compiler isn't among their goals, but writing a new compiler without slowing down language progress in the current reference compiler is not easy.

bad_user13y ago

Actually a language compiler is more complicated than a web server when speaking about the data-structures and the algorithms used and represents the best test that you can have for a programming language.

Also, you would want a compiler written in a high-level language (versus C) precisely because you want to speed up the development of new features.

awj13y ago

Yes, it's more complicated, but it doesn't really have much in the way of demands on the language used for implementation. It may royally suck to do, but you can write a compiler with nothing more than logic, data structures, and file I/O. That was my point.

> Also, you would want a compiler written in a high-level language (versus C) precisely because you want to speed up the development of new features.

Sure, but you'll need to pull people away to do that and will either have to stop your C-based compiler effort or resign yourself to prolonging the Go-based compiler development by playing catchup. In the meantime you aren't really as productive as you could have been. Go seems like it's about to slow down on language-level changes, which is the perfect time to start working on a Go-based compiler.

gngeal13y ago

Actually a language compiler is more complicated than a web server when speaking about the data-structures and the algorithms used

That would depend on how much of the web environment you want to reproduce and what language we're talking about. The original Oberon fit into some 5500 lines of code, if I'm not mistaken. That's sort of smaller than Apache httpd. It's even smaller than nginx and lighttpd. And we're still talking about pretty weak languages, have you seen some of the self-hosting metacompiler stuff? (META-II, TREE-META, OMeta etc.) Don't forget that the design of the reference Go implementation is actually pretty close to the Oberon tradition of making things simple.

1 more reply

laumars13y ago

I would have thought so (but I'm far from an expert on such matters). However you'd still have the issue of users wanting to download Go's build tools from source (as not everyone likes to install pre-compiled binaries on their systems) and not being able to compile the compiler.

Granted gcc could now be used. But then you're back to using a compiler built in C++ to build Go code.

jlarocco13y ago

It is possible to write a Go compiler in Go.

But the current compiler works, has a lot of testing and production use and isn't broken in any serious way. For a compiler, I'm not sure Go offers enough benefits over C/C++ to make it worth throwing away the existing code base and rewriting.

whyrusleeping13y ago

Not quite yet, it still builds a small bootstrapping tool with C

Rooki13y ago

See https://github.com/axw/llgo for a 3rd party implementation based on LLVM that's fairly far along.

pjmlp13y ago

I would say it is.

Sure you will need to use Assembly for a few runtime parts, but C is no different, if you look at ISO/ANSI C without language extensions.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse