Well, I have an update: I’ve pulled the plug.
Rationale: I’m giving up on Go. The language (IMHO, naturally) is not a “systems programming language” while it discourages access to system calls, and has only an (undocumented and weak) facility for accessing other operating system APIs.
Similarly, having Unicode and UTF-8 is great … but if you can’t even normalise a UTF-8 string, then comparisons (and sorting) degenerate to byte comparisons. I suppose it works for ASCII ….
There are other items of friction, both linguistic and process wise, but in short: I don’t see the value of putting my time into a port, and am pulling the plug.
Game over.