> Very cross-platform out of the box. Not “sort-of cross-platform as long as it’s unix” like C/C++

Wut? Firstly, no it's not. I have to drop into MinGW just to interface with native libs statically. Many languages don't do this. Secondly, C++ is very at home on Windows. Not a very good FFI story for something that is very cross-platform that it only binds w/ C libs with only one Unix compiler (gcc). It's like you got the phrasing exactly backwards and need to switch Go and C/C++.

> Go feels under-engineered because it only solves real problems.

Until I list the ones it doesn't. Or are they not "real"?

You know what? I'm not reading these things anymore. We know the type...supposedly senior devs writing a bunch of words about one language over another, cherry picking specific things for both to fit the narrative. I feel like this is how Michael Moore would write blog posts comparing languages. Sorry to hop on this article like this, saw it a couple of days ago with the Java/Kotlin blog post too and I'm seeing it every so often. And I like Go and Java. I'm afraid I just don't see these language opinions as that valuable anymore since I write in them all myself and know better.

Edit: In retrospect, probably a bit harsh. But I'd prefer the journalistic lang X does this but not this approach over the op-ed.

Go is cross-platform out of the box.

The problem is that you can integrate other languages like C which often don't come with cross platform compilers. So any Go program which depends in some way on C is not cross platform anymore (as long as you don't have a cross platform C compiler).

To be honest I don't know how to solve that issue. On the one hand I really like the easy cross platform capabilities of the Go compiler, on the other hand I don't want to sacrifice language interoperability for cross platform builds.

I wonder how someone who has C/C++ experience thinks of Go as not being a cross platform language.

Support more compilers (e.g. clang, msvc). It can be more work than it's worth, sure and I understand the issues there, but jumping through hoops per platform (e.g. can't use a popular lib like https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 on Windows without a MinGW gcc installation) is worth noting when touting the cross platform ease of use. Langs like Rust were lucky to compile to the same IR as a cross-platform C compiler.

> I wonder how someone who has C/C++ experience thinks of Go as not being a cross platform language.

I don't think that and definitely never would. I said it has issues, namely in the Cgo department. And I said that the other statement about C/C++ only being Unixy was wrong.

I definitely like Go and its cross-platform ability and hope I didn't give the impression that I don't.