I'm not sure what you define as a build system, but it's even in the description of the go build tool (https://golang.org/doc/articles/go_command.html https://g

I'm not sure what you define as a build system, but it's even in the description of the go build tool (https://golang.org/doc/articles/go_command.html https://golang.org/doc/articles/go_command.html): > An explicit goal for Go from the beginning was to be able to build Go code using only the information found in the source itself, not needing to write a makefile or one of the many modern replacements for makefiles. If Go needed a configuration file to explain how to build your program, then Go would have failed. And the hope is that go generate would be a hook into the dependency graph of go build. Much like the architecture switches, the naming conventions, etc, it seemed like it really could have solved my project's protobuf problem. But it's not, and for reasons that rob pike's doc and the mailing list did not make clear. It looks like a mis-step to me, and I don't think it's due to my misunderstanding of what `go build` and 6g/gccgo are