Not particularly anything to do with Go. A C compiler is only needed for the SQLite source code.

I originally provided these musl-based builds so I could provide rqlite Docker images based on Alpine[1]. But now the Docker release process simply builds rqlite from the source during the image-creation process[2].

[1] https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine

[2] https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite/blob/master/Dockerfile

I was thinking of Go's static binaries. These are dynamically-linked. Yet they are still quite large. Too big for me.