The Go team originally wanted to replace C++, especially inside Google, but they didn't succeed. According to googlers on Hacker News, very few projects inside Google actually use Go.
The reason Go attracted these kinds of developers is precisely that it isn't a systems programming language. Systems people want something like Rust instead.
You don't return to 1992 C++, thinking nah this is fine.
Companies like F-Secure are using Go for real system programming just fine.
The problem is more of mentality and not having management willing to push it down unbelievers no matter what, that prefers to recycle UNIX clones instead to save money.
Midori powered Asian Bing for a while and even then the Windows team did not believe it was possible.
Im glad you said that and I was not just imagining that myself. I remember following the Go language closely in its earlier days and it was often spoken about as a "systems language" but it actually seems to have ended up settling as a language to write servers for people who are sick of OOP but still like their imperative C style code.
- Java has lots of brittle reflection in some libraries and JDK can be finicky, especially with GC tuning
- .NET needs a runtime, historically there's Mono, now there was .NET Core and now there will be just .NET, though in some cases there's also IL2CPP and so on
- Python not only generally runs slow, but also has problematic package management, especially with vent
- JS (Node in particular) has similar package management woes as well as really fast package deprecation
Lots of applications and some tools will get written in Go because of this, because it's pretty reasonable to use in most cases.
In comparison, C, C++, Zig and Rust would all be better suited for systems level programming or embedded development - they typically let you write more performant and less memory hungry code, at the expense of foot guns and slower development.
> .NET needs a runtime
It doesn't. With a single command .NET Core can produce stand-alone single-file cross-platform deployables needing no SDK, Framework, runtime, or other dependency on the server.
> Go at least partially solves some of those problems, by being compiled, having decent performance, somewhat rich ecosystem and passable package management, all while the language remains usable.
It does, and I've been a big fan of Go for a fair few years now. However every point made in that sentence applies equally to .NET too.
The one area where Go beats C# (and most others) hands-down for me is the build time. It's a whole order of magnitude (possibly several) faster than most alternatives.
I'd argue that most systems that won't die out eventually will need a rewrite, or alternatively, in the modern day we'll see more and more polyglotic systems popping up.
Therefore it always makes sense to explore the best options for a particular bit of development, regardless of whether it's Node, Python, Java, Go or something else.
Like building what?