Are you looking at the "simple" or the "optimized" versions? For the optimized, yes, the Go one is very similar to the C. For the simple, idiomatic version, the Go version [1] is much simpler than the C one [2]: 40 very straight-forward LoC vs 93 rather more complex ones including pointer arithmetic, tricky manual memory management, and so on.

[1] https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/c66dd01d868aa83dc... [2] https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/c66dd01d868aa83dc...