But, yes, to samhw's issues, it is now trivial in Go and built into the standard library to embed arbitrary files and/or directories into a Go executable. Also have no idea what the "semi-grudging" comment about build tags are; they've been there since the beginning and heavily used by the Go standard library for many things. Go, of all languages lately, is the most comfortable with reserving things for the compiler/runtime; if they wanted to, they would have. It was always obvious that build tags were necessary and I don't see what's "grudging" about them at all.