A few years ago, when I started pondering about the possibility of porting juju to the Go language, one of the first pieces of the puzzle that were put in place was goyaml: a Go package to parse and serialize a yaml document. This was just an experiment and, as a sane route to get started, a Go layer that does all the language-specific handling was written on top of the libyaml C scanner, parser, and serializer library.
This was a good initial plan, but for a number of reasons the end goal was always to have a pure Go implementation. Having a C layer in a Go program slows down builds significantly due to the time taken to build the C code, makes compiling in other platforms and cross-compiling harder, has certain runtime penalties, and also forces the application to drop the memory safety guarantees offered by Go.