[topspin]

"up to snuff on the HTTP front"

I think this is a pretty major piece as well. Go was introduced many years earlier, backed by Google marketing and had strong HTTP services as a day one feature; it was designed for probably the most popular use case by perhaps the most influential fount of new tech. Given all that has Go really done all that well? Has it gone much beyond network services and a couple other niches (Docker/K8s etc?) It's not really displacing C/C++ in 'systems' use cases. It's not a go-to language for Machine Learning. The runtime+GC obviates most embedded work. You don't see any meaningful uptake of Go among Google's peers; Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. I wonder just how important Go really is.

[ovao]

Frankly I don't know if Go passes any barometer for "important". I don't think it's significantly disrupting any particular space, so if that's the measure of a language's importance, I don't think Go's quite meeting that. I find it unlikely it ever will.

I don't think it was ever intended to be important in those terms, however. It was designed primarily to solve specific sets of problems at Google, but I don't think any sights were set on the C, Java or other related language worlds at large. From that perspective, I would argue that Go's actually been fairly successful.

I'd argue the Rust team is much more eager to be a real disrupter. I think in that sense, they're succeeding in ways and have not yet achieved success in others.

[catach]

> Given all that has Go really done all that well?

My intuition is that the only languages that have grown faster are those that were blessed as "native" for a popular platform. For it's age it seems to be doing really really well.

But given Go's mix of advantages and disadvantages, should we expect it to be doing better? I doubt it.

Still to be seen if it becomes a Ruby or a Java, though.

[cube2222]

Actually, as far as I know, Microsoft is using Go in a few places in Azure.