In a much more complex sense, yes. Go's build process starts from various cruft found in Linux, OSX, or Windows, and makes a beeline for its own (more uniform)

In a much more complex sense, yes. Go's build process starts from various cruft found in Linux, OSX, or Windows, and makes a beeline for its own (more uniform) cruft, where things are uniform enough to build Go's toolchain. It is interesting to me, primarily, because as a Go user, I never have to see it. The toolchain's abstractions are good enough that, as long as I don't meddle with the syscall package or keep my CGO interactions shallow and confined, I really don't worry about crossing between developing on OS X and testing and deploying on Linux. (Or even crossing between amd64 and ARM, now that Go 1.1 is out.) Even cross-compilation is very straightforwards, once again, assuming you stay the hell away from CGO.