esr

I'm still writing code and shipping releases. I have a book in progress.

Yes, I've been quiet. I never really liked being Mr. Famous Guy; I did it tactically to achieve the mission of mainstreaming open source and gave it up as soon as I could.

Thing is, it wasn't a rewrite. I deliberately did as dumb and literal a translation as I could because I feared that if I tried to change the code wile translating it the complexity of the job would spiral out of control.

One reason this is clear in my mind is that we did do a lot of serious optimization after the dumb straight-line translation first passed my test suite. Because we could; Go's profiling tools are much, much better than Python's - in fact they're better than for any other language I've used.

Interestingly, one of the early results from profiling was t - once we got rid of one O(n2) that only blew up on stupidly large repositories like GCC's - the profile didn't show any of the usual kind of 80/20 hotspots. The biggest box was GC - the Python code had already been really well optimized. Er, who knew?

That makes this a particularly good language vs. language comparison.

I've written something relevent here: "Structure Is Not Meaning".

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1387

It's a proof-of-concept. Don't get hung up on the parsing details, I expect I'm going to have to rewrite it at least twice.