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The author guessed a few things wrong:

* fmt.Println pulling in 300KB isn't proof that Go's standard library isn't "well modularized". It's the wonders of Unicode and other code that is actually used.

* 900K for the runtime isn't surprising when you have complex garbage collection and goroutine scheduling among other things

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> fmt.Println pulling in 300KB isn't proof that Go's standard library isn't "well modularized". It's the wonders of Unicode and other code that is actually used.

I would guess a large part is that it has to pull in the entire reflection library to support format verbs like %#v which renders the argument as a Go literal.

The C library supports unicode too nowadays (at least the GNU C library does) yet linking a simple program that uses printf does not import 300KB of code.

The answer comes from the reflection code as the other commenter states.

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