Go 1.5 Bootstrap Plan

So you need 1.4 to build 1.5....can you then rebuild 1.5 from 1.5? Would it be different? Would it make a difference if you then rebuilt 1.5 using 1.5 built using 1.5 rather than 1.5 built using 1.4?

I'm curious, as the document doesn't mention it, what is the benefit of bootstrapping? Is it primarily to allow future development to happen in the bootstrapped language, instead of the lower-level language (C in this case)? Or is there some other benefit I'm missing?

Ugh...this is going to make new ports such a pain. I can understand why they&#x27;re doing it, but this is going to make my life a lot more difficult.<p>If 1.4 is going to become the bootstrap toolset, that also suggests that 1.4 will essentially become &quot;long-term supported&quot;, meaning that if new ports require fixes to the bootstrap toolset (even in the cross-compilation) scenario, hopefully they&#x27;ll accept those changes upstream.

I&#x27;m more surprised that the Go 1.4 compiler is written in C. Writing a compiler in C sounds very unpleasant compared to a language like OCaml. Does anyone know why they made this choice for the initial design?

Is this going to be tricky for distributions or will they just have to keep a 1.4 version of Go around just to build modern versions of Go?

Is this going to use the same C to Go conversion tool that helped with the Go runtime conversion?

Well, now I just hope that generics are extremely helpful in writing compilers! :-)

If Go 1.5 relies on Go 1.4 which relies on C doesn&#x27;t go 1.5 still rely on C? I don&#x27;t get why they&#x27;re doing this. Also, will go 1.5 have generics?