FYI, Go currently requires Windows XP or later, so there is no need to support anything older than that.

For those interested, here is a small example of using Windows Journals I wrote in Go, based on the MSJ Windows Change Journal article and sample.
I can confirm this works with Windows 7 (32 bit) with Go 1.3.3. Must be run with Administrator privileges.

Is it possible to use USN Journals without Administrator privileges?

Not that I know of.
My plan was to use it in a Windows service, with a user space client interface, though there are probably better ideas.

Would love for this to get implemented, such a powerful feature.

Found this that could be of help.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2015/08/12/use-poshusnjournal-module-to-work-with-change-journal/

To add this to fsnotify adding support for it in x/sys/windows would be required first. The example that was posted earlier would be a good starting point for that.

Change Journals on the Microsoft site gives a nice general overview on how it works, how to use it from the fsutil, and how to use it programmatically.

FYI I worked briefly on an implementation for an USN backend for fsnotify but I just stopped working on it due to the fact that USN journals don't seem to work in windows containers.

If anyone is willing to test and improve on my initial implementation, feel free:
helio@f29508c

If anyone is willing to test and improve on my initial implementation, feel free: helio@f29508c

I pushed a slightly updated version of that in https://github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify/tree/usn – just a few formatting/style fixes, haven't even tried to run it beyond "it compiles". Won't work on it any time soon, but just wanted to save it somewhere in case the fork gets deleted.