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Comment by dvdplm | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't say anything about compilation speed. How close to 1.4 performance are we? The slow compilation on 1.5 has kept us on 1.4 so far.

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1.5->1.6 has roughly the same speeds. There are discussions about improving compiler speed in 1.7.

I was looking for this too. Disappointed to see no mention of it as compilation time doubled in 1.5.

Any idea what causes this increase? I'm surprised as I understood fast compilation times to be one of Go's major strengths.

The increase was caused during 1.4->1.5 by translating the whole compiler toolchain from C to Go. The core devs focussed on correctness over performance on the first pass. They clawed back a lot of the performance already, and though it is slower than it used to be, it isn't at all bad compared with C++ and other languages I've used.

The compiler was convert/rewritten from C to Go.

I'm a little sad about the slower compiler speed to, though it's still lightyears better than C++. But for my project it's juuust long enough that not having status printed while compiling feels pretty annoying.

If they just printed out each file as it was compiled, it would go back to feeling lightning fast. :)

(Maybe there's a way to do this?)

go build -x will print the subcommands as it executes them, is that what you are looking for?

boom! that does it, thanks. (well actually what i reallly want is in between -- just each file name as it compiled, in a pretty list that gives me something to look at while waiting for the compile. but this is 𝞊 away.)

Oh god, so it's not just me... it really is slower...

From the 1.5 release notes

Builds in Go 1.5 will be slower by a factor of about two. The automatic translation of the compiler and linker from C to Go resulted in unidiomatic Go code that performs poorly compared to well-written Go. Analysis tools and refactoring helped to improve the code, but much remains to be done. Further profiling and optimization will continue in Go 1.6 and future releases. For more details, see these slides and associated video.

Ok, cool. I can live with that :)

Thanks!

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