A native Go userland for your Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 appliances (opens in new tab)

The only place on the readme where I could find those figures you came up with was the partition table and obviously a partition of 500MB doesn’t mean the applications are going to be 500MB in size. In fact it’s quite the opposite; it pretty much guarantees the applications are going to be less than 500MB given you are going to want some headroom to work with.

To be fair, this is designed for Raspberry Pi, and nowadays it's almost impossible to find a micro SD that's less than 16 GB and costs significantly less than a 16 GB one, I don't think a couple hundred MBs are a concern (even if it hurts my soul too)

It appears the authors assume the user will choose an SD card as the rootfs. Another alternative is to run the RPi with a tmpfs mounted directory as the rootfs and use the SD card as tertiary storage. This way I do not have to worry as much about the quality and condition of the SD card. To conserve RAM, I need the bootloader, kernel and the "always-installed" userland to be relatively small. With NetBSD, I can usually fit this all in under 20MB, leaving the rest of RAM as free tmpfs space to use however I wish. If I need to use some large Go binary for some specific task, I install it after boot in the free space. Then I remove it when the task is completed. Another alternative is to put these larger programs in a compressed filesystem such as cloop or squashfs, stored as a file on the SD card. NetBSD allows me to mount cloop2 filesystems read-only from tertiary storage. https://man.netbsd.org/vndcompress.1

I originally thought go binaries we’re large. Turns out they can be quite small.

https://joeldare.com/small-go-binaries

Urgh! This is really not good for most embedded systems both for space constraints and having to load large binaries from slow devices.

Embedded boot time should be below 4 seconds (the time people give up loading a web page).

Wondering if they can achieve that.

When comparing C and Go, a natural comparison would be to compare the output from GCC and GCCGO.

> aside from the Linux kernel and proprietary Raspberry Pi bootloader — only contains Go software.

Given this is what the README states, how can it be a GNU/Linux distribution?

It doesn’t include a shell or anything like coreutils either (GNU or otherwise).

More like Go/Linux

This space is really interesting to me- developing for pi by bundling up a whole image, for weird little software/hardware experiments.

Anyone know if there a list of these types of frameworks anywhere?

Interesting! How does it differ from Gocrazy?

Yep, but that makes it a non-starter for most Pi deployments, I think -- especially on Zero Ws, which is where this would be most interesting.