tcl VS ccgo

Behold, a 16MB "Go" file: https://gitlab.com/cznic/tcl/-/blob/master/lib/tcl_windows_amd64.go

Based upon info in an AUTHORS file [0] for a different project by the user cznic, I think there is indeed some kind of connection with nic.cz

But I believe, based upon my membership on the GoNuts group / mailing list, that this is mostly the work of one individual, Jan Mercl (he is quite active in GoNuts) — as also stated in the previously mentioned AUTHORS file, and in the AUTHORS file for the port of Tcl that is the subject of the OP [1].

I have used some of his non-transpiled code/projects in my own Go projects in the past. He seems to be a very solid coder, often happy to share his views in GoNuts, and also frequently reviews others' code too.

[0] https://github.com/cznic/golex/blob/master/AUTHORS

[1] https://gitlab.com/cznic/tcl/-/blob/master/AUTHORS

I think the author of modernc.org/sqlite also ported the test suite. They wrote https://gitlab.com/cznic/tcl to run the TCL-based tests, for example.

Is "ported" the right term here? It know the repo's README says "CGo-free port", but this is the C version of TCL transpiled from C to Go (see the ~13MB .go files per platform in the "lib" directory). Which is a very cool idea, and the author has done the same thing with SQLite, to avoid CGo (https://gitlab.com/cznic/sqlite).

Here's a link to his C to Go translator: https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo

Totally agreed: almost all users (me/GoAWK included) want performance and don't care nearly as much about simplicity under the hood. Simplicity of implementation is of value for educational purposes, but we could easily have a small, simple 3rd party package for that. Go's regexp package is kinda too complex for a simple educational demonstration and too simple to be fast. :-)

I actually tried BurntSushi's https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go (bindings to Rust's regex engine) with GoAWK and it made regex handling 4-5x as fast for many regexes, despite the CGo overhead. However, rure-go (and CGo in general) is a bit painful to build, so I'm not going to use that. Maybe I'll create a branch for speed freaks who want it.

I've also thought of using https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo to convert Mawk's fast regex engine to Go source and see how that performs. Maybe on the next rainy day...

FYI it uses facility to translate C to go (https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo), there is a similar project does the same thing (https://github.com/elliotchance/c2go).

It's not really pure go, it's transpiled using https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo

Just about all the code looks like this:

  // Call this routine to record the fact that an OOM (out-of-memory) error

It would be interesting to read a comparison against https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo