There is an existing pure Go library [1] written by someone else. The issue is that we weren’t confident we could ship a reliable parser. We even included an excerpt from the systemd documentation, which didn’t exactly reassure us:

> Note that the actual implementation in the systemd codebase is the only ultimately authoritative description of the format, so if this document and the code disagree, the code is right

This required a lot of extra effort and hoop-jumping, but at least it’s on our side rather than something users have to deal with at deploy time.

[1]: https://github.com/Velocidex/go-journalctl