Signal handlers are pretty much impossible to write directly in a managed language (at least without heavy contortions from the runtime), because you could get a signal during a non-GC-safe point and then deadlock or corrupt your program. For example, malloc often takes locks internally; if you get a signal during malloc with that lock held and then try to malloc in your signal handler you can deadlock. Managed languages like Go treat allocation as an implementation detail rather than something the programmer has to explicitly invoke, making them basically incompatible with signal handlers.<p>(BTW, this is mostly a problem with signal handlers as a concept, not with Go.)<p>&gt; The problem with using the syscall module is that Go does not export Fork and Exec. It exports ForkExec, because it needs to ensure they run on the same thread.<p>And because you can&#x27;t safely allocate after a fork in managed languages, because fork drops your other threads, leading to the same problems above. :)