As someone else commented, the huge size of Go executables is down to a design decision to include a map of functions for panic reporting. There was a whole discussion on this recently on HN.

I don't know why the grandparent was downvoted. Go binaries are not small and the claim that this is a "small" single executable is untrue.

Hopefully the Go team will give us a flag to decide for ourselves whether to optimise for executable size or initialisation time. I know I'm fed up of uploading 50Mb files over dodgy wifi+vpn connections to update my server.

(edit fix repetition of design)