How does this compare to OS-only Runtime?

[aleksasiriski]

In the README.md I can see Go is mentioned but the Go runtime has been deprecated and it's recommended now to use the OS-only Runtime on AWS Lambda and just upload the Go binary w/o any external linking, would this project have faster cold starts with a Go binary like that?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-golang.html

[refacktor]

Hi @aleksasiriski

I have not done a direct comparison test against Go binary on the OS-only runtime, but yes — this project should generally have faster cold starts.

A typical Go Lambda binary is 5-15 MB and needs to initialize the Go runtime (GC, goroutine scheduler) before the request dispatcher starts up, contributing to longer Cold Start times. This C runtime compiles to ~20 KB, does zero dynamic allocation, and has essentially no runtime initialization.

Go can get smaller and lighter with CGO_ENABLED=0 and aggressive stripping, or much smaller with TinyGo, but a standard Go binary on provided.al2023 using aws-lambda-go won't match the cold start of a C or Rust handler linked against this runtime.

That said, Go's developer experience is hard to beat — if cold start isn't your bottleneck, aws-lambda-go is the easier path. This project targets C and Rust handlers where you want the absolute minimum overhead and are willing to work at a lower level for it.