> The executable is ~ 500kb.

So... is this good or bad? A Hello World in Go is on the order of 2 MB. That doesn't say anything about code bloat, it just says that Go prefers static over dynamic linking.

That 2 MB might be messier than you suggest. It seems like people close to the project spent time trying to clean it up:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6853