Cgo serves as a crucial component in Go, enabling integration with C libraries, which is essential for projects like CockroachDB that rely on external storage systems like RocksDB. While cgo facilitates significant functionality, it comes with drawbacks such as increased call overhead compared to native Go calls, manual memory management challenges, and complications in concurrency due to system threads blocking in cgo calls, which can lead to performance issues. Additionally, cgo complicates cross-compilation and static builds, requiring additional configuration and slowing down the build process. Debugging is also more challenging because Go's tooling doesn't seamlessly interact with C code. Despite these limitations, cgo remains valuable for leveraging non-Go libraries, though its use should be carefully managed to mitigate potential inefficiencies and maintain performance.