It's not as simple as NIH. Using cgo means you have to build and link external dependencies in another language. Compared to Go, this makes it quite a bit more difficult to build and distribute than a single binary. But I think the biggest reason is cgo is slow. Unlike rust which uses the C calling convention (correct me if I'm wrong) and has no garbage collector or coroutine stacks to worry about, Go has a hefty price to pay when calling a C funcion. For something like sqlite that causes a noticable slowdown. Typically what I like to do in this case is write a C wrapper around the slow API that let's me batch work or combine multiple calls into one. With sqlite, instead of fetching rows one at a time, I would write a wrapper that takes some arrays and or buffers to fetch multiple rows at a time. That amortizes the overhead and makes it less significant. When that's not possible, I use unsafe and or assembly to lift just the problematic C calls into Go. That can sometimes work wonders, but it's also not a magic bullet.