What's the point of doing that? I get that you want a language to bootstrap itself, but if you skip the experience of actually writing the compiler, and the code you have to maintain is a weird non-idiomatic machine-generated thing, what have you gained?
"Why move the compiler to Go?
Not for validation; we have more pragmatic motives:
Go is easier to write (correctly) than C.
Go is easier to debug than C (even absent a debugger).
Go is the only language you'd need to know; encourages contributions.
Go has better modularity, tooling, testing, profiling, ...
Go makes parallel execution trivial.
Already seeing benefits, and it's early yet.
Design document: golang.org/s/go13compiler"
"Why translate it, not write it from scratch?
Correctness, testing.
Steps:
Write a custom translator from C to Go.
Run the translator, iterate until success.
Measure success by bit-identical output.
Clean up the code by hand and by machine.
Turn it from C-in-Go to idiomatic Go (still happening)."
More developers (who don't know c (good enough), but are proficient in go) who can contribute to the compiler code long term (and improve the transpiled compiler). Other reasons would interest me as well.
Yes, I doubt it too. But are they interested in contributing to the go compiler if they don't already do that? I would guess go users are more interested in contributing to go. Plus the compiler people who are good at c and are already contributing can probably get up to speed with go quickly if they want to and don't know go yet. Or they already know go because they use it.
I think it is similar to what some people say that they will contribute to open source project only if it is on github. So it is not logical but nonetheless many want it.
> Just as an experiment I cleaned up the runtime function mapaccess1_fast64 by hand in assembly and made it 29% smaller and with a speed improvement too small to measure.
Who forgets to break in switch statements? I mean yea, there was a time when I started programming I did this once or twice but not for a quite long time. Seems to me more like a request for sloppy programmers than anything else.
