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I think it's sometimes good to ignore what has come before and start fresh, if you have the resources to throw at that, as the Go team at Google apparently does

I think it's sometimes good to ignore what has come before and start fresh, if you have the resources to throw at that, as the Go team at Google apparently does. Platforms and toolchains accumulate cruft over time; I guess the Go team decided it was time to simplify by, for instance, using their own link editor. I think that in an ideal world, they'd forego dynamic linking entirely; Plan 9 doesn't have it, after all. The things wesolows pointed out about the Go asm dialect do seem weird, though. And what's with the Unicode dot character?

bcantrill 12y ago
The problem, honestly, is that they didn't start from scratch: they used a bunch of their Plan 9 tooling to jumpstart it. While I don't quite share Keith's invective, I do have a lot of questions that haven't really been answered about why it was done this way. In particular (and a point that Keith only makes in passing), the fact that the Go runtime directly encodes the system call table is a very peculiar design decision that makes the system much, much less portable. And lest anyone point to the many ports: it has been ported to other systems only with great frustration -- which is part of what you're seeing in Keith's rant here...