The important point about Go in this case is that it's fundamentally more efficient because it has real modules and can do incremental compilation.
Sometimes people don't realize this because they always use `go build` which, as the result of a design flaw, discards the incremental objects. When you use `go install` (or `go build -i`) each subsequent build is super fast.
Huh, really? Why is that? Non-incremental builds shouldn't be needed at all, but besides that, just based on the names I'd expect `go build` to be the cheap one and `go install` to be the expensive one.
It's unfortunately not a well-known feature. The Go extension to VSCode was using "go build" (without "-i") for a long time, and if you're working on something big like Kubernetes, it's almost impossible to work with.
The annoying thing is that "go install" also installs binaries if you run it against a "main" package. I believe the only way to build incrementally for all cases without installing binaries is to use "-o /dev/null" in the main case.
Sometimes people don't realize this because they always use `go build` which, as the result of a design flaw, discards the incremental objects. When you use `go install` (or `go build -i`) each subsequent build is super fast.