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Go's assembler syntax is inherited from Plan 9 project, which started in late 1980 and first released in 1992.

For context, gcc was first released in 1987 i.e. about the same time that Plan 9 started.

Go authors didn't attempt to re-invent asm syntax. They re-used the work they did over 30 years ago.

And at the time Plan 9 happened it was hardly re-inventing anything either. It was still the time of invention.

References:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection



And at the time Plan 9 happened it was hardly re-inventing anything either.

Intel's Asm syntax was defined in 1978 with the release of the 8086, and the 32-bit superset in 1985 with the 386. CP/M, DOS, and later Windows assemblers all used the official syntax.


Plan9 assembler syntax didn't start out on x86, and is kept the same across all platforms as much as possible.


The question remains, why not reuse the work that somebody else did even earlier, and that has a lot more adoption already?




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