It was based on my own experience (with e.g. sdl2) and, clearly, some ignorance. I didn't mean to imply that cgo was an insurmountable barrier. But apparently

It was based on my own experience (with e.g. sdl2) and, clearly, some ignorance. I didn't mean to imply that cgo was an insurmountable barrier. But apparently it was a big enough deal for the authors of this engine that they copied over large parts of major API surface to Go to avoid it. Impressive. However, AFAICT avoiding cgo means using unsafe tricks and trusting that struct layout will stay compatible. Nevertheless, it's a proven solution and as you say used by many already.