[jerf]

Go also has a runtime that does non-trivial things. If it can dump the GC out of it it'll shrink, but "hello world" would still be fairly large compared to many other languages. Having no tree shaking or similar optimizations also means that using a function from a library pulls the whole thing in.

While I look forward to being able to use things other than Javascript or languages seriously confined to Javascript's basic semantics in the frontend, I expect Go to be a laggard because it's going to be hard to get it to not generate relatively large "executables". I expect other languages to be the "winners" in the not-JS-frontend race.

[ptman]

Go pretty much only does static linking. The whole library does not get linked for a single function