You can see the true size of the Go pclntab in ELF binaries using "readelf -S" and in Mac binaries using "otool -l". Its not zero.
One thing that did change from Go 1.15 to Go 1.16 is that we broke up the pclntab into a few different pieces. Again, it's all in the section headers. But the pieces are not in the actual binary's symbol table anymore, because they don't need to be. And since the format is different, we would have removed the old "runtime.pclntab" symbol entirely, except some old tools got mad if the symbol was missing. So we left the old symbol table entry present, with a zero length.
Clearly, we could emit many more symbols accurately describing all these specific pieces of the binary. But ironically that would just make the binary even larger. Leaving them out is probably the right call for nearly all use case.
Except perhaps trying to analyze binary size, although even there even symbols don't paint a full picture. OK, the pclntab is large. Why is it large? What are the specific things in it that are large? Symbols don't help there at all. You need to analyze the actual data, add debug prints to the linker, and so on.
That would make an interesting post, and perhaps we will write one like that. But not today.
