[rpercy]

100% agree re: readability (as I've mentioned elsewhere).

I've actually been very surprised at the near-ubiquity of Go in the modern infrastructure/tools space though. Seems like each new OSS product I evaluate is written in Go. See companies like Cloudflare, Hashicorp, InfluxData, CoreOS, and, obviously, big projects like Kubernetes.

[IshKebab]

I think that's mostly because Go trivially generates static binaries, and cross-compiling is also trivial (as long as you don't use CGo).

I can't actually think of a single other language that matches that. Rust might get there one day but cross-compiling still requires a C cross-compiler (ugh) and C dependencies (e.g. OpenSSL) are often dynamically linked.

[steveklabnik]

Cross compiling shouldn't require a C compiler unless you have a dependency on C code.

Most wrappers should at least provide an option to statically link the C; I know the OpenSSL ones do.

[IshKebab]

Not a C compiler, but you need a C linker, which is just as much hassle. Apparently there is work going on to use LLVM's lld linker, which I guess might support cross-compiling in a sane way but I haven't checked.

And yeah most wrappers provide a static linking option but there's not much consistency which is rather annoying.

[user5994461]

Go is meant for distributed systems. All these companies, and generally speaking a lot of infrastructure thing is in that domain. They use the right tool for the job.

[MichaelGG]

Can you elaborate on why Go the language is "meant for" distributed systems?

[mseepgood]

It has been explained on multiple occasions by the language designers what they meant it for, e.g. https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article