One reason is that gccgo supports many architectures that gc does not (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha). It also was the only way to get Go on Solaris until the more recent port of gc to that platform.

gccgo is also supposed to produce better code for certain computationally heavy workloads.

> gccgo is also supposed to produce better code for certain computationally heavy workloads.

Unfortunately, this is very seldom true. Gccgo could potentially generate faster floating point code, but its lack of escape analysis grinds it to a halt.

with gccgo you get to take advantage of a lot of gcc's optimizations (-O3) and it can generate faster code because of it.

There is extremely little code in the world that is faster with gccgo. Yes, gccgo can do better with floating point, but the lack of escape analysis slows it down tremendously in every real world situation out there.

http://dave.cheney.net/2013/11/19/benchmarking-go-1-2rc5-vs-...

There is a GSOC to add escape analysis (https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/g...). It'll be interesting to see how that affects things.

Wow. I guess the last time i look at the differences was around 1.1 Thanks for the correction