It remains that easy until your Go/Rust project relies on libraries written in other languages, say C.

(This holds true for JS/python/… too.)

Right. But even then it does not become that much worse.

Just tell Go to use the appropriate cross compilation chain for the C bits, e.g. `apt install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu` and set the `CC=aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc` environment variable to compile for arm64. Compilation becomes a bit slower, but it's still manageable.

It's that easy thanks to the foundations laid by the distribution that ships a solid cross-compiler setup (in this example, thank you Debian!) and of course the brilliance of the Go design and toolchain.

Relying on libraries written in C is not an issue if the library doesn't make assumptions about / isn't tied to, a particular architecture. Some do but most (especially newer codebases written to C11 and beyond) don't.

There's also the issue of performance-optimised assembly routines, which impacts many native libraries doing things such as crypto, image processing, etc.

The issue is that someone has to initially write the code to emit the native assembly/machine code for each architecture that a given compiler supports. (i.e. assuming it actually emits native code and not code for another compiled language like C/C++) The flag simply means that someone has already done that work for a particular language on a particular architecture.

Absolutely, it’s a lot of work. Just saying the work had already been done for Go and Rust even before M1 made it mainstream.