[gregwebs]

The difference is that Go has its own linker rather than using a system linker. Another article could explain the benefits of tighter integration and the drawbacks of this approach. Having its own toolchain I assume is part of what enables the easy cross compilation of Go.

[jrockway]

You can actually make go spit out .o files and link it with your favorite linker. Bazel does this, if you ask it to.

I played a lot with experimental linkers when I was trying to get build time down for our (well, $JOB-1's) large Go binary, but they didn't help that much. The toolchain that comes with Go is quite good.