I was generating 7-15Mb binaries out of Delphi in the late 90's (it had a similar kitchen sink approach) and it simply wasn't an issue then and it certainly isn't an issue now.

I'm actually racking my brain for a case where a 500kb vs 5Mb binary would be a deal breaker, outside of embedded stuff I can't think of much.

Just as a minor point -

One of the major blockers to clojure in android is that the lack of treeshaking/deadcode elimination makes for 10 second+ startup times in most environments.

It matters when you have to download the file over a slow network.

"The ideal size is 10-15MB globally. Idea size for an app for tier 2/3 countries (like India) is below 5MB. 500MB+ is a non-starter. At 50MB+ the conversion rates fall off dramatically."

http://time.com/3589909/internet-next-billion-mobile/

Go binaries compress well in my experience. For example, I have a Go program that compiles to an 8.2 MB binary when compiled with gc 1.4.1. With bz2 compression, which takes about half a second on my box, it can be shrunk down to 2 MB.

If Google keeps Go away from Android, as first class language, only having the Go team doing NDK related support it doesn't really matter.

I don't foresee any changes on this regard at Google IO.

From what I hear you have the funds and resources to operate at that scale.

Part of the reason Go exists is because of such issues. Believe me, it's not desirable.

My point is, on typical machines today, even a 10mb binary is not an issue at all.

And this is a reason why, though I like the language, it's pretty useless for embedded work. Not all the world is lacking in resource constraints.