Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly (tinygo.org)

Tinygo made a lot of progress over the years -- e.g. they've recently introduced macOS support!

It does indeed produce much smaller binaries, including for macOS.

  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time tinygo build -o test-tiny main.go
  
  ________________________________________________________
  Executed in    1.06 secs    fish           external
     usr time    1.18 secs    0.31 millis    1.18 secs
     sys time    0.18 secs    1.50 millis    0.18 secs
  
  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> time go build -o test-normal main.go
  
  ________________________________________________________
  Executed in   75.79 millis    fish           external
     usr time   64.06 millis    0.41 millis   63.64 millis
     sys time   96.76 millis    1.75 millis   95.01 millis
  
  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> ll
  total 5096
  -rw-r--r--@ 1 yuriy  staff    74B  3 Apr 19:17 main.go
  -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy  staff   2.3M  3 Apr 19:18 test-normal*
  -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 yuriy  staff   192K  3 Apr 19:18 test-tiny*
  yuriy@MacBookAir ~/t/tinygo> cat main.go
  package main
  
  import "fmt"
  
  func main() {
          fmt.Printf("Hello world!\n")
  }

We're using TinyGo and the Wazero runtime for our WASM plugin system in ServiceRadar, highly recommend both if you're using golang.

what's the tradeoffs compared to standard go

Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?