They really are. It drives me nuts because you don't need Go for static binaries, but in practice almost all Go programs are static and almost all non-Go programs are dynamic. I've even tried to build static binaries out of ex. C and it's a huge pain because nothing expects you to do that so you have to fight your libraries since your distro probably didn't ship the static .a files to link in, and apparently you can't just reuse the normal versions. So, basically network effects mean that Go=static, not-Go=not-static, which is sad.