Quite significant that Bell Labs Unix alums don't want to put up with C any more and actively purge it from their tree?
Go is quite literally written by the people who invented C, wrote C, and made it what it is today. (Ken Thompson wrote one of the first commits to the language).
The reason for purging C from the Go toolchain is that it makes it harder for Go developers to contribute. Go developers already all know Go (by definition) - why make them use a language that they may not know as well in order to contribute back to the project?
Furthermore, mixing C code with Go code can cause performance issues if not done right. While you can expect the official project to "do it right", this still raises the bar for people who know Go and want to contribute, but don't know C as well.
And frankly, I don't think it's that significant to say that they don't want to write C anymore. C was a great language for its time, and it still is a great language in many ways. But it's almost half a century old; it would be more surprising if after almost 50 years they couldn't write a language that they prefer even more!
Furthermore, mixing C code with Go code can cause performance issues if not done right. While you can expect the official project to "do it right", this still raises the bar for people who know Go and want to contribute, but don't know C as well.
This is why Go was maintaining it's own C compiler -- They had it modified to work well with Go, as far as I am aware[1].
Comments
Go is quite literally written by the people who invented C, wrote C, and made it what it is today. (Ken Thompson wrote one of the first commits to the language).
The reason for purging C from the Go toolchain is that it makes it harder for Go developers to contribute. Go developers already all know Go (by definition) - why make them use a language that they may not know as well in order to contribute back to the project?
Furthermore, mixing C code with Go code can cause performance issues if not done right. While you can expect the official project to "do it right", this still raises the bar for people who know Go and want to contribute, but don't know C as well.
And frankly, I don't think it's that significant to say that they don't want to write C anymore. C was a great language for its time, and it still is a great language in many ways. But it's almost half a century old; it would be more surprising if after almost 50 years they couldn't write a language that they prefer even more!
This is why Go was maintaining it's own C compiler -- They had it modified to work well with Go, as far as I am aware[1].
Removing it means one less compiler to maintain.
[1] From Go 1.4, the source for the Go C compiler: https://github.com/golang/go/tree/883bc6ed0ea815293fe6309d66...