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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

> Why transpile, not generate BPF directly

> gc, the Go compiler, has no LLVM-based BPF backend. Adding one is a multi-year compiler project. rustc is built on LLVM and that's why Aya works. So gobee emits C and reuses clang's BPF backend, which gives us mature codegen, BTF, and CO-RE relocations for free.

I wonder if TinyGo (https://tinygo.org/) might be a better fit here:

> TinyGo brings the Go programming language to embedded systems and to the modern web by creating a new compiler based on LLVM.

I've not played with TinyGo much so would be interested to hear other peoples experiences.

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Here's another option.. I created an optimizing eBPF compiler in Common Lisp for a lisp-ish DSL. It's nice because you can compile and load your eBPF code all in-process in lisp (even from your REPL) without any external tooling. https://github.com/atgreen/Whistler

Well tinygo takes some go bindings they implemented for llvm, https://github.com/tinygo-org/go-llvm, uses the Go standard library for parsing, and wires it up to a LLVM IR generator, with a set of flexible backend/machine definition machinery.

You could likely improve gobee to use tinygo's packages directly, instead of transpiling to C and calling into clang, and the licenses of the two projects look compatible. You'll still need to deal with defining a subset to pass the verifier, of course.

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From the README:

> Replace clang. clang's BPF backend gives us CO-RE, BTF, and verifier-friendly codegen for free. Reimplementing that costs years and gains nothing.

The primary gotcha you may hit if you try this is how much of the BPF features are implemented by clang, and how much is instead implemented in core LLVM. Even with a LLVM sitting next door you could pull out, the harnesses may not exist independent of clang, but I have not looked THAT deep.

I did work on a plugin system for Filestash leveraging wasm. Plugins made with tinygo were 10x slower than the same code in rust or c compiled to wasm

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/ser...

Yeah I’m not surprised by that. TinyGo might leverage LLVM but it still has all of the Go conveniences that would make it benchmark slower compared to C and Rust. Though I’m sure that gap could be closer if TinyGo had the same level of investment that Rust or Googles Go compiler had.

What I was more curious about was how TinyGo compared with Googles Go compiler and whether TinyGo’s LLVM compiler is compatible with vanilla LLVM compilers (eg can TinyGo compile to all the same targets that, for example Rust, could?)

I'm curious if Solod https://github.com/solod-dev/solod would be a good fit. It's not "real" Go, but you write Go and generate C.

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