Build Tags and Cross Compilation

The Go 1.27 toolchain on one machine can build programs for 47 targets, and a target is a pair of an operating system and a processor architecture. The command go tool dist list prints all of them. The list covers 15 operating systems, and the same list marks 8 pairs as first class, which means that the Go project treats a failure on one of them as blocking a release.

Building for a target other than the current machine is called cross compilation. In Go, it needs no extra compiler for pure Go code (code that does not call C)