Because cloning the dependency is not the issue here. CocoaPods is keeping its index in a git repo that is updated by the user as a way to get the latest index.

Because cloning the dependency is not the issue here. CocoaPods is keeping its index in a git repo that is updated by the user as a way to get the latest index. This is the repo that incur a lot of requests from everyone. Go get on the other hand doesn't keep any index. It just uses the url to download the dependency because of the mapping "url==project name" that exists with go projects.