A Go binary in the deploy pipeline, and who owns it

A small compiled tool in a PHP project, and the question that matters more than the language.

the questions, asked before writing it:

  who can change this in six months?     two of three
  where does it build?                   in the same
                                         pipeline as
                                         everything else
  how is it versioned?                   with the
                                         repository
  what happens if it breaks at 03:00?    the shell
                                         path still
                                         works — the
                                         binary is an
                                         optimisation

the last answer is what made it acceptable.

A second language in a repository is a maintenance decision rather than a technical one, and the mitigating factor here is that the binary is not on the critical path — the fallback is the shell implementation it replaced, kept and tested. That is unusual and is what makes this defensible; a tool with no fallback would need a different conversation.