I'm considering using Go as a low-level, performant language alternative to C/Objective-C to implement a library for an iPhone App. Could either of the Go compilers generate a library that could be linked into a native iPhone app with the Go runtime, etc.? Is there an ARM port for Go or does gccgo/gcc support this? I imagine that since gccgo uses gcc as the back-end and Xcode uses gcc to compile iPhone apps that there is a strong chance that this is possible. If it's possible, how would I set that up in an Xcode project?
Has anyone tried this or seen it discussed before? (When I do a Google search like "compiling go code iphone" the "go" part is completely unused and I get only stuff about iPhone development.)
Go doesn't support the iphone platform right now, but it does support ARM processors. There hasn't been much discussion about this on the mailing list though.
Even if possible, I suspect Go is significantly slower than C or Objective C. Most independent benchmarks seem to suggest poor performance using the current development versions. These microbenchmarks against C suggest Go is 2 to 150 times slower than C. It is even slower than Java and C# Mono. So I see little reason to call Go a performant alternative.
Although it depends on your application, I suspect leveraging the GPU api is the best bet for most performance problems.
One thing to at least look at would be Lua. It is fast and is a language I like using. iPhone Wax uses lua.
The Go Mobile project now has some support for IOS and Android mobile development. See the wiki section on Building for IOS for details for your application.