The start of September brings a close to the Go 1.4 merge window. From now until the release in December, only bug fixes and tweaks will be accepted.

A major piece of work that landed in Go 1.4 cycle was the rewrite of parts of the Go runtime from C to Go. What may not be widely known is the main Go distribution¹ includes a C compiler whose primary function is to compile the C code in the runtime package.

Rewriting parts of the runtime in this cycle provided the following benefits.

• Currently if C code in the runtime is found on a Goroutine’s call stack the runtime will fall back to the old split stacks method if it needs to grow the stack. When all the parts of the runtime called from Go code are written in Go, the copying stack method can be used more effectively.
• The translation of the Go compilers themselves from C² to Go is only planned to convert the Go compiler, (5g, 6g, 8g), not the C compiler. Reducing the number of lines of C code in the runtime, possibly eliminating them entirely, will make the compiler rewrite simpler.

Here are the numbers.

The data captured here is not the total line count of C and Go in the runtime package, but the count of lines compiled as part of ./all.bash. In effect

go list -f "{{ range .GoFiles }}{{ . }} {{ end }}" | wc -l
go list -f "{{ range .CFiles }}{{ . }} {{ end }}" | wc -l

for each revision that included runtime: in the commit log.

Notes

1. This is the golang.org distribution, commonly known as gc, not gccgo.
2. This is a different C compiler; the gc toolchain is compiled with your system’s C compiler, the gc runtime is compiled with its C compiler.
3. The increase in number of lines converted after August 20th is probably related to this request by khr.