[kortex]

One nice thing about Go is the existence of cgo. Yeah, it's discouraged, and rightly so, but you have that option. The ol' "Give it to C, C will do anything".

The other is IPC. Go is so dang easy at concurrency, managing data flow, async IO, etc, that I find it really lends itself to working as a cog in a larger machine, usually distributed. Don't like solving problem X in Go? Solve it however you want and just talk to your Go process.

So you have 2 escape hatches which were much less tenable as overall approaches even 10 years ago. So hopefully Go can stay lean and mean. I think it also helps that unlike other systems languages, Go doesn't have any intent on being a catch-all language. Graphics, hard real-time, drivers? You ain't gonna reach for Go. Light scripting, data science, machine learning? Also probably not Go.