Status of gccgo (generics support) and its standard library

[Ken Micklas]

Hi Gophers,

I have a use case for gccgo, but before investing in it more, would like to understand better the long term maintenance prospects. Currently it looks like gccgo has been stuck on basically Go 1.18 standard library features for a while, due to the lack of generics support in the frontend. Generics are not critical for my use case, but they make it challenging to use third party libraries from the ecosystem, and this seems like it might get worse over time.

My understanding is that gccgo is always going to lag behind gc some amount, but that the goal is to still keep it maintained and eventually backport all language / standard library features from gc. Is that correct? If so, is there a very rough ETA for generics support?

Thanks,

Ken

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 6:29 AM Ken Micklas <kmic...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a use case for gccgo, but before investing in it more, would like to understand better the long term maintenance prospects. Currently it looks like gccgo has been stuck on basically Go 1.18 standard library features for a while, due to the lack of generics support in the frontend. Generics are not critical for my use case, but they make it challenging to use third party libraries from the ecosystem, and this seems like it might get worse over time.
>
> My understanding is that gccgo is always going to lag behind gc some amount, but that the goal is to still keep it maintained and eventually backport all language / standard library features from gc. Is that correct? If so, is there a very rough ETA for generics support?

I am actively working on adding generics support to gccgo, but
unfortunately I don't have an ETA.

Ian

[Cal Pratt]

Hey Ian,

The usage of third party libraries is becoming a lot trickier lately, e.g. protoc-gen-go-grpc now produces outputs using generics.
I was curious if there are any recent updates in this topic, or if there is any thread I could follow for future updates?

Thanks,
Cal

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Sat, Dec 7, 2024 at 10:27 AM Cal Pratt <ccpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The usage of third party libraries is becoming a lot trickier lately, e.g. protoc-gen-go-grpc now produces outputs using generics.
> I was curious if there are any recent updates in this topic, or if there is any thread I could follow for future updates?

There are no updates, sorry. You can see changes on the
gofrontend-dev Google Group.

Ian