zlacker

Reading some of the comments here, this is only a significant point if your language/tooling makes building non-trivial (and/or slow). For example, for Go it is insignificant whether the source project provides builds because building is so straightforward, fast, and even cross-platform. A lot of Go tools don't ship builds because you can just `go install` and be faster than navigating a web UI, clicking a Download link, and saving it into your PATH.

>>Ferret+(OP)
"You can just go install" is what I read a lot, but installing Go can be quite a pain. It's also not exactly clear that you need to run "go install" from a source code dump, which many Go projects seem to come with.

Building Go programs is only easy if you're building Go programs in your everyday life. The same can be said for any language (just cmake/make/cargo/npm/gradle build/install/package!), there's really no "easy" way to build any software unless it's well-documented in a way that will guide you through the build steps on every OS under the sun.

Of course no developers have any kind of obligation to provide build steps or binary releases, but don't think it's easy because you find it easy. I remember trying to build a Go program the first time and needing to figure out how to install Go in a way that didn't mess up my package manager because Google expects you to untar files manually rather than provide some kind of software repository for automatic updates.

>>Ferret+(OP)
Simple go programs are simple to compile.