Indeed, but it would be much more useful and impressive if they rewrote the compiler in Go by hand. I'm disappointed that they are aiming for an automatic trans

Indeed, but it would be much more useful and impressive if they rewrote the compiler in Go by hand. I'm disappointed that they are aiming for an automatic translation instead - some people are going to ask themselves whether Go actually isn't that much fun to program in. An independent reimplementation is better for correctness too, they can compare outputs and find bugs in both implementations instead of porting over old bugs and adding new bugs where the translation goes wrong.