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Oh, no I don't mean that arbitrary Go compiles to eBPF. Apologies if I gave that impression. I meant that there are libraries that let you compose eBPF programs in other languages. But you're still putting together an eBPF program, just like you can assemble JSON with Go but you can't compile an arbitrary Go program to JSON.

Cilium's eBPF library is the Go one I had in mind: https://github.com/cilium/ebpf

Here's an example from that repo: https://github.com/cilium/ebpf/tree/main/examples/ringbuffer

BPF works more like Java, where you have your high-level source code, then a JIT compiler translates it to bytecode that runs on a VM. Even BPF “programs” written in C aren’t using a standard C compiler. The BPF JIT compiler translates them to bytecode.

The subset of C you can use is fairly limited, only what their compiler supports. So what people have done is written compilers that can take Go or Python and compile it to BPF bytecode.

This [1] makes me think gobpf uses C bindings to bcc, so golang does not compile to eBPF, bcc does.

[1] - https://github.com/iovisor/gobpf/tree/master/bcc