ebitengine/purego

Cgo is terrible, but if you just want some simple C calls from a library, you can use https://github.com/ebitengine/purego to generate the bindings. It is a bit cursed, but works pretty well. I'm using it in my hardware-backed KMIP server to interface with PKCS11.

Have you tried purego? You can just embed the C library into the binary of the Go app call it directly in Go. Most of the time I have found calling C from Go faster or on par with calling C from Python. https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

That is a nice approach. I'll have to give that a try with rclone. I tried lots of things in the past but not using Alpine which is a great idea Another alternative is https://github.com/ebitengine/purego You can use this to dynamic load shared objects / DLLs so in the OP example they could disable systemd support if the systemd shared object did not load. This technique is used in the cgofuse library ( https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse ) rclone uses which means rclone can run even if you don't have libfuse/winfsp installed. However the rclone mount subcommand won't work. The purego lib generalizes this idea. I haven't got round to trying this yet but it looks very promising.