I know. As long as Go has garbage collection, a scheduler for goroutines, etc. it will have a hefty runtime compared to good old C. There's no free lunch.

I like static linking too, and I think Go's binaries aren't so bad when you compare them to the whole executable + shared libraries set that you would get with a dynamically-linked equivalent. (I hear gccgo can create smaller binaries but also that they're slower. Haven't tried it myself.)

upx also looked interesting when I started reading about it today, and it does dramatically reduce the size of the binaries. But I don't think I like the slower startup due to the decompression step. As far as I can tell, the main benefit of upx is saving disk space but for me the whole point of smaller binaries is faster launches and less thrashing thanks to smaller working sets. I'm not sure upx helps with either of those. But I only found about it today while reading up on what people have been saying about the size problem.