[andhow]

If the title was "Could Go be used instead of C for a great many applications?" then the author would stand a chance at making a point. However, asking whether Go can "replace" C shows a deep misunderstanding of why people still use C: to do the type of stuff that a safe, typed and garbage collected language won't let you. Need to poke hardware? Need to use efficient memory layouts for your data structures that confound non-dependent type systems? Need exact control over generated code to achieve competitive performance? (And, apparently for Go's case) need to handle OOM conditions? (The "some systems don't even have malloc() return NULL on OOM" argument was particularly weak.) True, these things can be handled by C/C++ and called by Go through a FFI, but then C hasn't really been "replaced".

Really, the title should be "Can simple C programs be written in Go in about the same number of lines?" because that's all that was demonstrated.