Are you sure? Well, it uses "reflection" in a general sense of introspecting your SQL code, but not in the Go sense of using using type information at runtime via the "reflect" package. sqlc compiles your SQL at build time to statically typed, non-reflect-using functions, as shown here: https://docs.sqlc.dev/en/stable/howto/select.html
Good point. I had assumed Rows.Scan() would have just used type switches for efficiency -- it looks like it does for common cases (https://github.com/golang/go/blob/d62866ef793872779c9011161e...) but then falls back to reflect. I wonder why it doesn't just do all of that with type switches? Maybe there are just too many cases and it ends up slower than reflect for the rest of the cases.
Scanner.Scan() is actually just called via a type assertion, though I guess implementations of Scan() might use reflection.
sqlc doesn't quite work that way (though "sqlx" and other packages do). sqlc generates code at build time that avoids reflect by using database/sql's Rows.Scan() with pointers to fields (see the link above):
var i Author
if err := rows.Scan(&i.ID, &i.Bio, &i.BirthYear); ...
This generated code is exactly what you'd write by hand if you were using database/sql directly.
As earthboundkid points out, database/sql itself may use reflection under the hood to convert the individual fields (though the common cases are done without reflect, using ordinary type switches: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/d62866ef793872779c9011161e...).