from Hacker News

Go 1.7 toolchain improvements

by spacey on 4/2/16, 9:37 AM with 98 comments

  • by tptacek on 4/2/16, 2:35 PM

    If you're not a Go programmer, bear this in mind: the Go compiler got noticeably slower after 1.4, but it is still extraordinarily fast; "run debounced after every keystroke" fast; "rebuild the world on a whim" fast.

    Personally, I think the Go community is a little unhealthily obsessed with this particular metric.

  • by munificent on 4/2/16, 5:21 PM

    There's something vicariously gratifying about posts like this. Optimization is some of the most fun programming to do: you have a crystal clear objective goal to go for and once you've got a profiler set up it's just:

    1. Find slow thing.

    2. Make faster.

    3. See benchmark improve.

    Some of the most satisfying coding I've done has been optimization.

  • by hellcow on 4/2/16, 11:01 AM

    I'm glad to see a return to improving compiling speed and binary sizes. Thank you to the Go team!
  • by spriggan3 on 4/2/16, 11:12 AM

    - faster compilation times

    - smaller binaries

    good job.

  • by lossolo on 4/2/16, 11:14 AM

    You can find interesting details to this post in this thread:

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/DpMyPbclI...

  • by hacker_9 on 4/2/16, 11:11 AM

    I'm confused how Go can be paraded as a low level systems language, which improves performance via concurrency, and yet the graph says it's compiler is still over twice as slow as when it was written in C?
  • by ruffrey on 4/2/16, 2:46 PM

    As someone new to the joys of golang, it is hard to imagine faster compile time or smaller binaries. It just keeps getting better.
  • by RichWalton on 4/2/16, 12:12 PM

    What happened between Go 1.4.3 and 1.5 which introduced such a slow down in compile times?
  • by arktisklada on 4/3/16, 1:19 AM

    As an avid go user, I'm excited about these improvements, especially the garbage colleciton
  • by manojlds on 4/2/16, 11:06 AM

    Can someone tell me why they went from C to Go despite the huge difference in compilation time?
  • by montyedwards on 4/2/16, 2:53 PM

    The only thing preventing me from using Go on Windows is lack of production quality cgo on Windows x86 and x64.

    For example, using external linking should "just work" with recent versions of sqlite3 but it fails on Windows.

  • by verytrivial on 4/2/16, 12:15 PM

    (I went to high school with Dave. Hi, Dave! Signed, misc. Banyule Alumnus)