On Thursday, January 3, 2019 at 12:11:06 PM UTC-5, Jake Montgomery wrote: > > I would note that any tool that ports from C++, or even C, to Go is going > to produce ugly, unmaintainable, and non-idiomatic code, at best. >
These are two different cases. I agree that graceful C++ to Go transpilation is effectively impossible. On the other hand, I believe graceful, comment-preserving C to idiomatic-Go transpilation is almost possible. By 'almost' I mean that the tool would pass through a small enough percentage of untranslated residuals for corrections to be around a 5% job for a human expert. I've had a lot of incentive to think about this because my concerns center around vast masses of C infrastructure code in critical network services like NTP, DNS, etc. The security and reliability consequences of unsafe code in that swamp are serious and it needs to be drained. Transpilation to golang is, I think, the first realistic hope we've had of doing that without a prohibitively high labor input. By possible I do not mean easy. I've scoped the job and done a design sketch. I think my qualifications for writing such a transpiler are exceptionally good, but it would nevertheless take me a minimum of two years of hard work to get there. I have put put some feelers for funding; if I get to choose my next major project after NTPsec, this would be it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
