The bit about people uninstalling when they see a 2MB no-op demo program is so dumb. That is a fixed cost, its just because Go packages it's runtime in the EXE

The bit about people uninstalling when they see a 2MB no-op demo program is so dumb. That is a fixed cost, its just because Go packages it's runtime in the EXE so you can distribute it and expect it to actually work rather than depending on a runtime being available on the system. Sure there are niche cases where that isn't appropriate, and you don't use Go for those. But that initial 2MB doesn't tell you anything about how program size grows for actual projects.