It’s a unique and different language that clearly hit some kind of niche. It’s great when a language has any users and this one has quite a bunch. That’s super cool!

Personally I don’t like it. Not low level enough for when I need to go low level, not high level enough when I want to go high level. Also I would have wanted generics right from the start; that should be the norm for typed languages unless the types are really super simple (Go’s are complex enough to warrant generics in my opinion).

But, maybe the reason why Go has the niche it has is because other programmers prefer it the way it so. So it goes with languages - it’s an aesthetics thing just as much as it is a technical thing.

Go has wide enough adoption that I don’t think you can call it niche anymore. It’s become somewhat of a de-facto systems/infrastructure programming language and is replacing Python in a lot of places where it was traditionally used for automation.

The language is simple, performant and writing concurrent code is intuitive (although I feel Go developers tend to get carried away using channels/goroutines).

Because every time I need to use a lock I know I am not smart enough to do so. Channels and go routines, I can reason about. (Tho they are slower - I have a runtime stats package that just stuff the numbers into a channel and then returns to the calling goroutine. I did an implementation using Atomic’s and it could sustain like 20x more calls per second before using all the callers CPU. But I still use the channel implementation.

Rust is ideal for this scenario: it lets you use the faster locks / atomics, and the compiler will check everything for you (assuming you can use a standard implementation rather than needing to implement your own - but there are well tested libraries for most common use cases).

It is on my list of things to learn but learning go made me so happy the urgency has decreased. Did they ever finish that rewrite of the core unix cmd line utils from C to Rust? Like find and if config etc. a rust busybox I guess.

In general there has been more effort put into trying to improve on the default tools through projects like ripgrep (grep), bat (cat), lsd and exa (ls), and fd (find) rather than creating drop-in replacements that don't provide all that much over the battle tested originals.