By the time I reached this post, the number of translation tiers managed to confuse me. To help others, here's a breakdown. Notation: T[A,B] : Translates from

By the time I reached this post, the number of translation tiers managed to confuse me. To help others, here's a breakdown. Notation: T[A,B] : Translates from A to B The OP wants to develop T[C, Go]. The question is which language should T[C,Go] be written in? Option #1: If T[C,Go] is written in C, then it can use an existing C parsing library to parse C and then emit Go. Here parsing will be easier, but emitting Go will be laborious to write in C (since C is very low level). Option #2: If T[C,Go] is written in Go, then the parent claims that C parsing will have to be freshly developed in Go. This will be a pain but the Go emitting code will be easier to write in Go. However, I think the problem with option #2 (parsing) can be avoided if one uses the parsing library that is assumed to be already available in C. Since Go can interface with C code[1], the parser need not be reinvented. [1] : http://golang.org/cmd/cgo/ http://golang.org/cmd/cgo/