Just to briefly jump in: statically compiling dependencies: roughly equivalent to "I want to link against a Go lib"? AFAIK the standard answers are "use cgo"

Just to briefly jump in: statically compiling dependencies: roughly equivalent to "I want to link against a Go lib"? AFAIK the standard answers are "use cgo" (which has problems[1]) and "maybe plugins?"[2] but I don't know how plugins are working out. static compilation solving transitive dependencies: only if you have no singletons. In that case, yes! But the outside world is a singleton - anything on disk, through network, etc, anything with external state now has to deal with all past and future versions of the code simultaneously. Possible, but difficult and/or wasteful. For pure code though, yeah, this is a great solution, and it's part of why npm's "use all the versions" works out for micro-libs so well - they tend to have their state injected, which allows you-the-user to control how versions interact (if at all). Unfortunately you're left with node_modules[3] (as you mentioned). [1]: https://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go https://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go + you just inherited a multi-threaded lib, which may cause forking problems later. [2]: https://golang.org/pkg/plugin/ https://golang.org/pkg/plugin/ [3]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3SOI-_WAAAM4Js.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3SOI-_WAAAM4Js.jpg