> If you're scaling based on a prepared image, then you can prepare the image by unpacking a tarball, rather than copying in one file... as far as i can see, this is completely orthogonal to having a single-file deployment. You haven't made any case at all for why having single-file deployment is valuable here.
If you have a prepared image / immutable infrastructure pattern, that image is the single-file pattern. Container images are tarballs. Go isn't actually all that special here, if you compare apples to apples in containerized deployments: either you bake the standard library into the binary (which Go does), or you bake the standard library into the tarball (which the JDK forces you to do). Either way it's a single file.
If you have a prepared image / immutable infrastructure pattern, that image is the single-file pattern. Container images are tarballs. Go isn't actually all that special here, if you compare apples to apples in containerized deployments: either you bake the standard library into the binary (which Go does), or you bake the standard library into the tarball (which the JDK forces you to do). Either way it's a single file.