enormous amount of work.

Cgo takes a different approach. It determines the meaning of C
identifiers not by parsing C code but by feeding carefully constructed
programs into the system C compiler and interpreting the generated
error messages, debug information, and object files. In practice,
parsing these is significantly less work and more robust than parsing
C source.

Cgo first invokes gcc -E -dM on the preamble, in order to find out