[mike_hearn]

I'm surprised that people only seem to be considering Go as an upgrade to static typing, from languages like Python or Ruby.

Kotlin has a very lightweight syntax with lots of type inference as well, but also has many features that people often seem to miss in Go. It also has transparent access to all Java libraries, which is a huge number, which is a big benefit. It seems like a natural path for people who liked dynamic languages. It's much less well known, of course.

https://kotlinlang.org/

[rjbrock]

Well there are a few reasons that I decided to pick up go rather than something like kotlin.

1. No jvm needed. This may not be a benefit if you need to access java libraries, i just like that you can compile a binary. 2. Great concurrency support 3. Seems to be more popular. This may sound like a poor reason to choose a language, but if its more popular there would be better documentation, libraries, ide support, etc

[mike_hearn]

That's usually a good heuristic. But Kotlin has better IDEs, tools, debuggers, profilers etc than Go. Partly because it's made by a developer tools company (they make many of the top IDEs), and partly because it can leverage all the tools made for Java.

WRT not needing a JVM, I don't perceive much advantage to avoiding one unless you need small downloads i.e. desktop apps. But Go isn't suitable for that use case really anyway.