Learning Go: Go for iPhone/iPad

Strictly speaking, it is hard to say that this post is about “learning” the Go language. I just want to tell a story: after I successfully (but might illegally) installed GCC 4.2 on my iPhone 4, I went on to build Go. However, I got the following error messages:

Make.inc:79: *** Invalid $GOOS ‘darwin’ for GOARCH=arm; must be linux. Stop.
Did not find Go environment variables.

Then I searched “go darwin arm” in go-nuts group, the result leads me to a very new (Jan 7, 2012) and exciting work — a darwin/arm port of Go.

However, I also noticed a claim by the Go authors at the bottom of the discussion thread:

Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:48:18 -0500
Subject: Re: [golang-dev] Re: Darwin/ARM (aka. iOS) port of Go is READY
From: Russ Cox
To: minux
Cc: golang-dev@googlegroups.com

Sorry, I meant to reply about this before. We have decided
not to include the darwin/arm code in the main tree until there
is a way to run it on an ordinary iDevice without any kind of
“jailbreaking”. If the port advances to that point, please let
us know, but until then I’m afraid you’ll need to maintain your
own copy.

What a pitty for the official Go community~~ But so what! My best appreciation to minux, the author of the Darwin/ARM port of Go.