This was mostly fixed in yesterday's 1.1 release: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909

Why, oh why, would anyone be running x86 hardware in this Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Thirteen? It's been what, 10 fucking years that we've had AMD64 now, you can get free 64-bit systems from the curbside, just toss that goddamn PIII and get with the 21st century. Maybe then people can stop posting "Well, Go on 386 architecture has bugs, so don't use it for anything."

Intel fuses off x86-64 on some chips it sells for reasons of market segmentation.

They have stopped doing this for quite some time iirc.

still a stupid move on their behalf (as is the market segmentation of AES-ni stuff)

Small VPS instances with little RAM available.

Yep. Coupled with the fact that 32-bit applications can still marginally outperform equivalent 64-bit applications, those who have little RAM/CPU are still recommended to choose 32-bit over 64-bit.

IIRC, Go tries to allocate a contiguous portion of virtual memory. This isn't a problem in 64-bit, because the addressable space is so big, but a 32-bit system that has been running for a while may have enough memory fragmentation that you can't allocate a large enough block.

I have to agree about libraries. You don't realize how great it is to have finely-tuned JDBC drivers for every database on Earth until you can't use them.

Every compiler has bugs. All of them, even ICC, xlC, and other heavyweight ones. The fact that Go has a bug in the GC on a 32-bit machine is hardly surprising.

No need to split hairs.

Go had an easy to run into and not obvious to fix bug on 32bit. That's a bigger problem than most gcc/ICC/whatever bugs, which tend to be happen in obscure corner cases (because the most obvious bugs are long gone).