I was arguing with myself about adding additional context. It looks like I should have put it in.

In my professional experience, Go cannot consistently avoid producing binaries that fail when run on an incompatibly-different version of glibc than they were build and linked on.

Also. for most deployment situations, Go's "single, enormous binary" doesn't matter.

* In The Cloud(TM), you have full control over what you deploy. So, so, so often you have a custom VM or Docker image that you just squirt out there and automation to keep it updated and rebuilt, which makes deployment just trivial.

* On Windows, you have Windows Installer, which you can instruct to check for and install any prereqs you require. (It's incredible how all of the pieces to build a proper package manager have been in Windows since the early 2000s, and yet no package manager came out of MSFT.)

* On OSX, you either use the App Store or one of the handful of package managers... but I expect nearly zero non-Power-Users use the package managers. I guess there are also the nutballs who do 'curl $INSTALL_SCRIPT | sudo bash'.

* On Linux... well nearly zero non-Power-Users run desktop Linux, and those that do likely already have Ruby, Python, Perl, and GCC installed.