The Go Compiler and Go 1.8 with Keith Randall
Keith Randall from the Go team joined the show to talk about why a new compiler, what we gain from SSA, what’s next for the compiler, Go 1.8, and the goals/plans for Go 1.9.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Keith Randall: It needs some domain expertise. It’s not the easiest thing to jump in and touch. We made porting as easy as possible, so you don’t actually need to write any Go code to port the compiler to a new architecture, or at least it’s all tables and stuff, it’s not stuff that executes all the time. But if you wanted to add, say a new compiler optimization phase or something, it requires a fair amount of knowledge if you know - what SSA is, what transformations you can do on it, what you can’t…
[39:59] It’s not the easiest thing to jump in and do, but the people who jumped in and worked on stuff on a compiler, I think they all had some compiler knowledge, but they were by no means experts. I would say it’s sort of a middle-of-the-road thing if you wanna jump in; you should probably have taken Compiler 101 in college, but you probably don’t need anything higher than that.