<div dir="ltr">There was a recent podcast (changelog, perhaps?) where Andrew Gerrand discussed this aspect of Go 1.5.<div><br></div><div>The original Go toolchain was written in C by Ken Thompson (yes, the UNIX-writing peer of Dennis Ritchie) based on the toolchain from plan9. It was great to have a C-based toolchain while the Go language was changing.</div><div><br></div><div>Now that Go is stabilizing, and to help people contribute to improvements in the toolchain, it's helpful to move from the very Ken-Thompson-ish C toolchain to one that's more friendly to general collaboration. So Rob Pike wrote a C to Go translator and ran the compiler through it.</div><div><br></div><div>That resulted in a working but very ugly (one single package, and not idiomatic) Go program. They incrementally made it more Go-like over the course of a while, and they wound up with the version in Go 1.5.</div><div><br></div><div>You can use Go 1.4 and build it from scratch if you have a C compiler.</div><div><br></div><div>They mentioned the fact that gcc goes through multiple bootstrap stages to ensure that it can be built with minimal assumptions about the toolchain that is used to build gcc. They don't have something like that in Go, but you can use Go 1.4. They'll never create a toolchain that Go 1.4 cannot build.</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Chris Fowler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cfowler@outpostsentinel.com" target="_blank">cfowler@outpostsentinel.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:#000000"><div>I'm playing with accessing my Google Drive from Linux via CLI. That works so now I'm looking at compiling Go from source.</div><div><br></div><div>What I don't understand is "You need Go to compile Go"</div><div><br></div><div>I guess you do need gcc to compile gcc. You compile gcc then use it to compile itself. </div></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
Ale mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:Ale@ale.org">Ale@ale.org</a><br>
<a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale</a><br>
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at<br>
<a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"> Ed Cashin <<a href="mailto:ecashin@noserose.net" target="_blank">ecashin@noserose.net</a>></div></div>
</div>