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As far as I can tell, there are 2 advantages to the separated header file, implementation file pattern in C. First, you get easy documentation of a library's API, and second, the advantage that you mentioned (implementation changes do not necessitiate a full recompile).

I would argue that both of these (or atleast the core of these) is addressed by Go.

For documentation, there is a simpler way to get at a library's public API; an automated program that extracts that API and presents it in a web page (or in your console). See http://golang.org/pkg/unicode/utf8/ for an example (for completeness, here is the file it is generated from http://golang.org/src/pkg/unicode/utf8/utf8.go)

For avoiding unnecessary recompiles, Go solves this problem by making compiles really fast, rendering this problem moot.



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