GopherCon 2016: The Design of the Go Assembler - Rob Pike

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fourseventy · 2017-09 · Recommendation

This is relevant [VIDEO] Its Rob Pike talking about the go assembler and he answers a few of your questions.

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bkeroack · 2017-04 · Recommendation

Here's a good talk about the Go assembler backend: [VIDEO] Spoiler: they're nearly to the point (maybe now they've achieved it fully) of autogenerating a new language backend from ISA documentation PDFs! Bring that up next time someone complains about Go not using LLVM.

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chubot · 2017-02 · Recommendation

Have you looked at the Go toolchain at all? I don't know much about it, but they implemented their back ends in a manner that is much smaller than LLVM and GCC. And it sounds like the architecture of the compiler is significantly different. I watched this talk and it was pretty interesting: [VIDEO] [LINK] If I am understanding right, the claim is that they have a single assembly language for ALL GO architectures, based on something Ken Thompson wrote in the 90's for some National Instruments (?) chip. He actually says that all assembly language looks the same now. I was sort of surprised by that claim. I would like to hear a critique of this from other compiler writers. Does the fact that Go uses a single assembly language make the code slower? I imagine taking advantage of target-specific knowledge is useful, but I don't know how much. LLVM has this pretty elaborate TableGen system to express target-specific knowledge. He also makes the claim that they will be able auto-generate a new backend from the PDF description of the architecture. And he says somewhere that they reduce a lot of the work to simple "text processing" (symbol manipulation) and didn't require opening up any processor manuals. I can see how arithmetic and bitshifting is the same among all architectures. But I would think that even loads and stores have differences, at least if you want to use the processor efficiently. But he says everything kinda looks the same. Also, another thought is that compiling to W

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