According to my limited experience (small tools such as a process monitor linking to libproc) it is astonishingly easy and convenient to call C code from Go: no

According to my limited experience (small tools such as a process monitor linking to libproc) it is astonishingly easy and convenient to call C code from Go: no need to write bindings, as Cgo allows to access C symbols directly from Go. I would be interested in what are the difficulties when dealing with larger projects. For illustration, here's how I call the openproc() function from libproc: import ( /* #cgo LDFLAGS: -lproc #include <proc/readproc.h> PROCTAB* my_openproc(int flags) { return openproc(flags); } */ "C" ) func parse_procs() { proc := C.my_openproc(C.PROC_FILLUSR | C.PROC_FILLCOM | C.PROC_FILLSTAT) ... } This illustrates one issue I found with Cgo: calling functions with variable number of arguments is not supported. I had to define a new C function "my_openproc" with a fixed number of arguments, which you can see in the metadata of the import statement. It also includes the compiler and Cgo directives that make editing a Makefile unnecessary. The code for the whole tool is contained in one Go file.