Re: Proposed Go (Google's Go Language) port to NetBSD

[Giles Lean <giles.lean%pobox.com@localhost>]

A long, long time ago I wrote:

> I'm working on porting Google's "Go" language to NetBSD, at least
> for the amd64 and i386 ports.

Well, I have an update: I've pulled the plug.

Reason?  Go is driving me nuts (it's perhaps not an accident
that its mailing list is golang-nuts :-), and I don't see that
it is worth the effort of porting.

My porting efforts didn't proceed terribly far (mostly on
purpose) as I spent more time doing two related things:

1. noticing problematic situations in the languages packages
   and using those issues to learn the process for getting
   changes into the "official" Go source via the team at
   Google

2. while iterating s-l-o-w-l-y through #1 (and resonably often
   unsuccessfully, as many design decisions are not
   documented, and I made some wrong guesses) I spent time
   also writing Go code to learn the language.

For me, it's back to C: I like Go (still) but a "systems
programming language" that discourages using its "syscall"
package and makes only poor (and undocumented) provision for
accessing other operating system APIs lacks a little
something.  IMHO, anyway.

Similarly, Unicode support and UTF-8 strings are great ... but
if you don't have any way to normalise those strings and any
comparison or sorting of them (oh, no locale support either,
and opposition to including it!) degenerates to byte
comparisons ... well, I suppose it works for ASCII?

Anyrate, that's news, project abandoned.  But the archive will
have the explanation of why, in case anyone ever wonders "what
happened to ???".

Cheers,

Giles