Please answer these questions before submitting your issue. Thanks!

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go version devel +cbce223 Fri Jun 29 17:44:10 2018 +0000 linux/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes.

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

linux/amd64

What did you do?

I attempted to compile the following toy program

# t.go
package main

// void foo(void) {}
import "C"

func main() {
	C.foo();
}

with this command:

$ CGO_CFLAGS=-g1 go build

What did you expect to see?

A working program with minimal debug information.

What did you see instead?

A compilation failure:

# github.com/benesch/t
./t.go:7:2: call of non-function C.foo

Seems like cgo really needs debug information to be available. The problem changes with -g0:

$ CGO_CFLAGS=-g0 go build
# github.com/benesch/t
cannot load DWARF output from $WORK/b001//_cgo_.o: decoding dwarf section info at offset 0x0: too short

I don't particularly care if cgo silently upgrades the amount of debugging where necessary—or outright rejects -g0 and -g1. I just accidentally stumbled across this while trying to plumb some flags for msan through CockroachDB's C/C++ dependencies and it took a while to figure out what had gone wrong.

/cc @ianlancetaylor