They use a Mac to compare the Ubuntu Go package to a self-compliled go from source:<p><i>"Now we can diff the Go toolchain we’ve created on our Mac with the Go toolchain that Ubuntu ships:"</i> [..]<p>"<i>We’ve successfully reproduced the Ubuntu package’s executables"</i> [..]<p><i>"Note in particular that we’ve reconstructed the toolchain binaries bit-for-bit: they do not show up in the diff at all. That is, we proved that the Ubuntu Go binaries correspond exactly to the upstream Go sources."</i><p>Also, for your own programs:<p><i>"For Go programs that don’t need cgo, a reproducible build is as simple as compiling with CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath. Disabling cgo removes the host C toolchain as a relevant input, and -trimpath removes the current directory"</i>