Agreed. I wouldn't be surprised if a pure-Go alternative would be slower. Someone remarked upthread that the same author wrote a C-to-Go transpiler specifically

Agreed. I wouldn't be surprised if a pure-Go alternative would be slower. Someone remarked upthread that the same author wrote a C-to-Go transpiler specifically to make a pure-Go sqlite and it was (somewhat unsurprisingly) considerably slower than the CGo version. It's possible (and to an extent, likely) that the transpolar was generating suboptimal Go code, but I would wager that a hand-written version would also be slower.