Category: Programming

While interface values in Go are flexible, they do have confusing aspects. An interface value—e.g., a variable of an interface type— holds a value of some other type. The interface type is known as the static type, since that is the type that the compiler sees at compile type. The other type, which is only…

One of the interesting aspects of the Go language is interface objects. In Go, the word interface is overloaded to mean several different things. Every type has an interface, which is the set of methods defined for that type. This bit of code defines a struct type S with one field, and defines two methods…

Since the first thing I liked about Go is channels, I’ll talk some more about them. IA channel can transmit a value of a specific type. That is, a channel value of type chan T can transmit any value of type T. This is not much of a restriction, as the type interface {} can…

I heard about the Go programming language in May 2008 and was immediately interested. I spent a couple of weeks writing a preliminary gcc frontend for Go. I’ve been working on it ever since, with just a few interruptions here and there. It’s a relief that this work is finally out there. Both the language…

The gcc compiler has always worked by writing out assembly code in text format. The assembler reads this text file to produce an object file. Most compilers work this way, although there have been some exceptions such as the MIPS compiler used on Irix. Clearly this process of producing text and then parsing it again…