[catlifeonmars]

Others have pointed out that os/user.Lookup is a platform-independent way to resolve this, but additionally you don’t _need_ to link against glibc to use it.

If you are writing go, you usually want to set CGO_ENABLED=0 by default, to avoid inadvertently introducing nonportable code. In this way, only the pure Go implementations are used and there is no need to link (statically or dynamically) against a libc implementation to compile and run your programs.

[dchest]

With CGO disabled, it only reads /etc/passwd, while the glibc getpwnam(3) can query LDAP etc.

[catlifeonmars]

That’s not the use case of the tailscale daemon though, which was using getent passwd.

To clarify: I’m not against CGO, just introducing a glibc dependency by default. I would only introduce it when I needed it.