Notices by Marcel Weiher (mpweiher@mastodon.social)

So golang has a machine-independent assembler. Which is very cool, and yes, machine instruction sets for modern machines are very similar: ALU instructions, memory load/store, branches.

However, it appears that this machine-independent instruction set is not actually used by the compiler's code generator. Instead it has completely machine-specific backends, with all the extra effort that entails.

Anybody know why?

@me_

With that heritage, I would expect the opposite: that the go compiler *does* use the machine-independent assembler. If not the ASCII syntax, but the binary representation.

But it does not.

At least as far as I can tell.

As far as I can tell, each of the backends goes directly to the target machine, without the machine-independent assembler.