alt Hacker NewsThe difference is that Go has its own linker rather than using a system linker. Another article could explain the benefits of tighter integration and the drawbacks of this approach. Having its own toolchain I assume is part of what enables the easy cross compilation of Go.
You can actually make go spit out .o files and link it with your favorite linker. Bazel does this, if you ask it to.
I played a lot with experimental linkers when I was trying to get build time down for our (well, $JOB-1's) large Go binary, but they didn't help that much. The toolchain that comes with Go is quite good.