[jerf]

The further away from a "network server" you get, the less appealing Go gets. It's a general purpose language, but it's not entirely wrong to think of it as a DSL for writing network servers that happens to be useful for other some things.

Why doesn't lack of generics kill Go? Well, if you're working in Go's wheelhouse, []byte actually covers a lot of things and you're rarely that far away from it, because you're about to read or write a []byte real soon now. (I don't mean you always have one literally in hand, you probably marshaled in into a struct, just that you're often very close to either reading or writing it.)

Why does it work to have this error handling in Go? Well, when writing network servers or other basic cloud infrastructure, actually a lot of the errors require different handling on a case-by-case basis. Big ol' exception blocks around the whole operation are often hiding bugs, or at the very least, suboptimal exception handling. By contrast, when you're not writing the code to do all the nitty-gritty network operations it's a level of detail you don't want or need.

I think every single posted "success story" I've seen for Go has been a network server. I don't think I've ever seen one about how it really cleaned up my Android app, or how my game development was crashing and burning until I switched it to Go. I don't think this is a coincidence, nor do I expect to see one anytime soon, the recent Android support notwithstanding.