Re: [9fans] Go on Plan 9?

[Chris McGee <sirnewton_01@yahoo.ca>]

Hi All,

A while back there was a thread about getting newer versions of Go running on plan9. In particular there was a panic related to a floating point error.

In case anyone is interested I have managed to get the newest version of Go working on plan9/386 within virtualbox despite having a similar floating point error as was mentioned here before in that thread.

1) Download, extract and compile Go 1.4.3 from the source tarball
New versions of Go require older versions in order to compile through a bootstrapping process.
This is the last version that can be compiled without bootstrapping.
Modify the include/plan9/386/u.h and remove the line that has a typedef for intptr (in my 9front install this is already declared elsewhere).
Run the make.rc script in the src directory (don’t run all of the tests as many of them appear to fail)

2) Download, extract and compile Go 1.5.3
Set GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP to the go directory for 1.4.3 compiled above
Set GO386=387 (this is important as there appears to be a problem with sse2 floating point with Go in my environment - plan9/386/virtualbox)
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15234
Run the make.rc script (skip the tests for now)

3) Download, extract and compile Go 1.6
Set GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP to the 1.5.3 go directory
Run the all.rc script

Step 2 may not be necessary, but it worked for me this way.

It may also be possible to cross compile a bootstrap of Go from Linux/Mac/Windows using the bootstrap.sh script after setting GOOS=plan9, GOARCH=386 and GO386=387. That bootstrap can be placed into plan9 and used as the GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP to compile a full Go installation on the plan9 system.

I hope that this is useful information for others who are trying to get Go working on plan9.

Cheers,
Chris