“This change deletes the C implementations of the Go compiler and assembler”

LLVM is a C++ monstrosity that takes hours to compile. Other programming language projects have to maintain a "temporary" fork of LLVM to achieve their goals: https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/tree/master

Want to make it less gross? Make it completely go away.

Installation of Go or Python is just like any other Windows install. You download an installer.exe or .msi, run it, and you're done. Things compile or run immediately, and you don't have to start using a "special" terminal just for it to work.

My experience with MinGW is very different. Especially for dependent languages. "Step 1: Install MinGW" what does that even MEAN?:

"Ok, I ran this installer, and it brought up the MinGW Installation Manager. Is it done? What am I supposed to do here? Which one do I choose? How do you even select a package? What even ARE packages? OK, so I select something then go the Package menu and select Mark for Installation. It's not doing anything. Is it done now? Close window. Nope that didn't work. Open it back up. Oh, so after marking a package I have to go to the Installation menu and choose Apply Changes. ..."

This actually happened to someone I was trying to help over the phone. Heaven forbid they get lost in All Packages and get confused by the dozens of packages each with half a dozen versions and each with three different, non-descriptive "classes".

Installation needs to be braindead simple. During installation it should show a list of extra languages that can be installed, where you can't uncheck 'base' (with an "Advanced Options" button in the corner that opens up the standard installation manager instead). It should set up any environment variables, including PATH, (and including restarting explorer to refresh the env) and it shouldn't require the use of any terminal other than cmd.exe (despite it being terrible).

If you're installing something else entirely that depends on MinGW, their installer should be able to bundle the MinGW installer, and it should install without having to make any choices. It should detect if MinGW is already installed and install packages there instead, still completely automated.

Make it go away.

> If you came to me tomorrow and said "I want to build a language just like C but with non-contiguous stacks" I agree, I would use LLVM or GCC. But that's not what happened.

Except that is exactly what happened. Russ says: "segmented stacks; we had to build that, so it was going to be incompatible from day one."

That's the rationalization though. It wasn't about features that you can all but do in plain ANSI C being 'too hard'. We all know what really happened is that they were comfortable with their Plan 9 toolchain and made a demo using it... which is fine. Then they continued to develop their demo for 5 years instead of throwing it out and doing it right, and now they are stuck having to make excuses for why their compiler and assembler and linker and runtime and tools are sub-par.

Yes, I'd be happy to, but I'm not sure they are "solvable" issues, because they seem to be more of architectural mismatches.

Part of the issue with most software that uses MinGW is that it is written with posix-y operating system in mind. That is, operating systems that can very efficiently fork processes and quickly deal with many small files. Unfortunately, Windows does neither well. Process creation is slower, and NTFS is a very lock-happy filesystem.

Why do I consider this gross as a user? Things like Git that utilize msys are slow on Windows. As in, I notice the UI hanging. Things like autoconf are terribly slow on Windows due to all of the small processes that are created to detect the environment. Antivirus tools will lock files that are created and generally slow things down due to the nature of lots of quick-running processes creating and deleting small files.

These are just realities of most software written for non-Windows platforms. So whenever I see a program that requires MinGW, I'm always very hesitant to use it. The user experience tends to be terrible. I can still remember an issue trying to compile subversion on Windows using gcc and having it take well over an hour. Turns out with all of the processes being forked and temp files being created, the antivirus program was adding a delay to every command. After completely disabling antivirus it compiled in 15 minutes.

So, in one sense, this ins't a problem with MinGW or msys, but it typical of software that relies on it.

The other issues I have with them is that they don't integrate well with the native tools on Windows. For instance, Pageant is a good, graphical SSH agent on Windows. You have to mess around with environmental variables and plink and junk to get it so you don't have multiple formats of SSH keys on your machine. Trying to deal with SSH through bash and msys is not a user friendly experience. PuTTY is the gold standard of SSH clients on Windows.

Using msys/MinGW is like running X programs on OS X, Windows programs through Wine on Linux, or Java GUIs on any OS. It has enough strange warts and doesn't quite fit the feel of the rest of the OS.

That is where Go was awesome. I downloaded go and there were 3 exes on my machine. I ran "go.exe build source.go" and out popped an exe.

Rust doesn't do this because of the length of compile, it's because we occasionally patch LLVM, and then submit the patches upstream.