Getting the Go programming language to work on zLinux

There is an increased interest in the new programming language Go. The standard download page doesn’t have packages for s390x so I tried getting gccgo to work as described but with no success. Probably the current gccgo branch is broken for s390x.
So as a fallback I used the standard gcc 4.8.1. As the base I used a SLES 11 SP3. Here are the steps:

1. Check out gcc 4.8.1 using svn
   svn checkout svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/tags/gcc_4_8_1_release gcc481
2. Create build directory (here build) and change to it
3. Configure gcc with your favorite options, include go in it. I used
   ../gcc481/configure
   –prefix=/opt/gcc481 –enable-languages=c,c++,go –enable-shared
   –with-system-zlib –with-arch=z9-109 –enable-threads=posix
   –enable-__cxa_atexit –enable-checking –enable-lto
4. The configure script is going to complain on various missing or outdated packages. So you probably need to try multiple times in a clean directory.
   Get the missing stuff from the SUSE DVDs and install them or build them from source. (I used gmp-4.2.3 and mpc2-0.8.2 from the SDK and compiled mpfr-3.1.2  from sources and installed in /usr/local)
5. make
6. make install

The result is an installation in /opt/gcc481. Before compiling any application you need to set the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the new environment:

export PATH=/opt/gcc481/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gcc481/lib64/:/opt/gcc481/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Finally you can enter the hellozworld.go program

package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("Hello, z-worldn")
}

and compile and run it with

gccgo hellozworld.go -o hellozworld
./hellozworld

If you think this is an interesting language please approach Red Hat and SUSE and ask for it in the next releases!