[benesch]

It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.

I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.

I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.

Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.

[0]: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS

[sidkshatriya]

It's very important for both the compiler tools chains of go to continue working well for redundancy and feature design validation purposes. However, I'm generally curious -- do people / organizations use gcc-go for some use cases ?

[fweimer]

GCC Go does not support generics, so it's currently not very useful.