What is CGO and what are its performance implications?

CGO enables Go packages to call C code, allowing integration with legacy C libraries.

While powerful for utilizing libraries like SQLite or TensorFlow C++ APIs, CGO breaks Go's isolation. A CGO call involves an expensive context switch (switching off the Go scheduler and managing OS threads). It severely degrades the performance of the Go scheduler, complicates cross-compilation, and introduces C-style memory leaks and segfaults.