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The compiler is still in a relatively early stage of its development. At this point we feel we can make faster progress and attract more contributors if it is written in Go.

(Go programmers like to write Go code, who'd have thought? :-)

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Well, "attract more contributors if it is written in Go" I think that it isn't the point really. In fact, I think it's more easier if you're using C than or even C++. The question about C it's much error-prone language which would make development slow than using a more modern language with the C string and malloc()s pain. Not mentioned that it's cool a Go compiler written in Go and C# compiler written in C# :)

Good point about attracting developers. I guess Ken and Rob will eventually want to seek other challenges and leave Go to the youngsters and free software community.

Neither Ken nor Rob actively work on the compilers today. There are about 6 people in the Go community that regular hack on the compiler, yet the project has more than 100 active contributors. One goal of this change is to make the compiler sources more accessible to them.

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