It was early 2013, when we adopted Go as a default language for all our server side (micro or not) services. Before that we had been using Java for some years. The reason for the move were few:

1) Ambivalence on Java roadmap, in my understanding (gradual build up, since after the Oracle's Sun acquisition). Even the earlier clean java docs, suffered from Oracle branding efforts. Downloading older versions were confusing via a long chain of navigation between sites.

2) Boredom after nearly a decade with Java programming.

3) Memory usage of Java in our conditions was much higher compared to other languages (C, C++, Go)

4) Not Java's problem, but whenever one thinks of hosting a HTTP service in Java, thinks of using a container (e.g. tomcat, jetty, Jboss etc.). Go seemed to have made making services very easy. Its possibly just a perception issue, but its there in my experience.

So we wanted to move, and Go looked stable at the time from all my HN readings. C was too bare bones(even string handling was a pain to me, after a gap), and even C++ would not have matched some of the things which Go has inbuilt. Few examples:

1) Json/XML parsing is the easiest with no work (or minimal) required, you can just have the field names capitalized (or use stereotypes) and it gets done, with a line of code.

2) Great HTTP client and server libraries, which make very easy to write your own standalone services, as well as write http crawlers. (I am quite excited that Go 1.6 will have HTTP/2 support for both, as per this birthday blog).

So, in nearly three years of usage, with largely no regrets[1]. It is what they say it is: a bare-bones, fast (both compile & run) and stable (hardly get any errors after you have coded stuff, one of the stablest programming paradigms in error handling, etc).

Thank you, Go team! Hoping to use it for many years, as default server side language.

[1] Some of the 3rd partly libraries, we use are still not ported over to Go. They have Java, C++/C versions.

Obligatory plug - if you're sick of writing out the struct definitions yourself, you can generate them from sample JSON: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

This is especially useful when implementing REST servers/clients, because you can simply include an example JSON response which your tests use, and then use `go generate` to autogenerate the struct. Since they're both based on the same file, you don't have to worry about keeping them in sync - if there are any changes to the response structure, you only have to update it in one place.