Interestingly enough, the initial Go implementation was indeed just a transpiler to C, and generally Go and C are semantically very similar. So the fact that you can even (successfully and relatively easily) do Go->C transpiling isn't entirely surprising. Of course you can't port `go` keyword and GC, but the language that the author is developing (called So) doesn't support these features anyway :).
Interestingly enough, the initial Go implementation was indeed just a transpiler to C, and generally Go and C are semantically very similar. So the fact that you can even (successfully and relatively easily) do Go->C transpiling isn't entirely surprising. Of course you can't port `go` keyword and GC, but the language that the author is developing (called So) doesn't support these features anyway :).
I could be wrong, but I don't think the initial Go implementation was a C transpiler. It was written in C, but it did its own compilation.
Early Go was the first time I ever saw the Plan 9 compiler/linker used in action:
https://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html
Refreshing seeing someone coding without AI in 2026.