Hector Martin

you also can't statically link the entire world. eventually you must be dynamically linking, in a sense, to the OS kernel's syscall interface now, on Linux you have Linus who promises to keep that extremely stable, so it works however… Windows and macOS are not Linux.

a reasonable individual would conclude, okay, we'll make an exception to dynamically linking just for these OSes, and link to the OS's userland dynamic library that handles kernel stuff and which does have a stable interface however that reasonable individual is not the Go devs

Go tried to hardcode syscalls on macOS anyway. Then they broke the gettimeofday interface and all Go apps exploded. The other issue is that Go's C FFI is slow (and buggy and convoluted), and they have to use it for syscalls on those platforms, with worse results.

So Go *does* dynamically link with C libs in the end on those platforms, but that entire feature sucks.

aaaahahaha

I also wonder how they handle like, 3D graphics. I guess it's not something people use Go for, but if they want to, sorry… you need dynamic linking. You can't statically link the graphics driver, unless perhaps you really love Mesa

I mean, they do claim to support dynamic linking C libs. People use it. I've used it. It sucks.

The first time I tried using Go I ran into a FFI bug which took 2 days to find and fix (after the Go devs had been unable to figure it out for months) and then a month of bureaucracy to get merged. I didn't write any more Go after that (and after seeing the guts of the runtime).