Not saying this is all that matters, but if you have a verifiable c->go translator (that is to say, a well understood and tested translator known ("proven") to give you an output program that behaves identically to the input program), then you may be able to skip (or more likely alleviate) the awkward phase of bug introduction when translating a program. I think a problem like this is one of the cases where its easier to reason about in the abstract ("Clearly all arrays should be converted in this fashion"), vs the concrete ("in this part of the code we should do this with the array"), and also avoids the inevitable temptation of "fixing" or "cleaning things up" during the translation. Also of course there is a huge incentive for a good c->go translator to exist for the go community.