On: Lessons learned porting 50k loc from Java to Go

[grey-area]

Did you at any point dream of writing a translation tool which would port java to go automatically? (crazy idea I know)

[kjksf → grey-area]

Yes I did and I don't think it's crazy.

I'm not sure a tool could do 100% translation but I'm sure it could do a lot.

A surprisingly large amount of time was just moving the order of variable declaration from Java's "type name" to Go's "name type" and renaming, say, "String" to "string".

If a tool did that for me, it would save a ton of time.

Unfortunately, the upfront time investment to learn enough to write even the simplest translator would probably be greater than time saved on one project.