Comment 17 for bug 1267393

"Basically, the decision had been taken in Oakland last November that gccgo is the toolchain Ubuntu Engineering would support on the client and the foundations and security teams don't consider gc supportable from a distro standpoint due to the static linking issue."

Ubuntu Server also took the same decision; we wanted a single toolchain to work across all target architectures and gccgo was the only option that could provide this; however after alot of work to a) get everything functional on gccgo and b) alot of testing including at scale, the performance of gccgo was just not at the same level as gc; The decision to prefer gc for architectures where it was supported was made based on this process. We have to use gccgo on ppc64el and arm64 right now as this is still the only option.

I appreciate that the static linking feature of gc does not fit with the distribution model generally; I'd encourage people to read the MIR in detail - specifically the way that juju server binaries are distributed which is also different as I want all interested parties/stakeholders to understand the full facts of what we are proposing for main inclusion.