[KronisLV]

That's just one of the ways to think about it. Java, .NET (I felt like adding these two to expand on the comparison), Python and JS are all languages with a relatively high level of abstraction and large and useful ecosystems surrounding them. They're pretty popular for all sorts of application development, but all suffer from certain problems:

  - Java has lots of brittle reflection in some libraries and JDK can be finicky, especially with GC tuning
  - .NET needs a runtime, historically there's Mono, now there was .NET Core and now there will be just .NET, though in some cases there's also IL2CPP and so on
  - Python not only generally runs slow, but also has problematic package management, especially with vent
  - JS (Node in particular) has similar package management woes as well as really fast package deprecation

Go at least partially solves some of those problems, by being compiled, having decent performance, somewhat rich ecosystem and passable package management, all while the language remains usable.

Lots of applications and some tools will get written in Go because of this, because it's pretty reasonable to use in most cases.

In comparison, C, C++, Zig and Rust would all be better suited for systems level programming or embedded development - they typically let you write more performant and less memory hungry code, at the expense of foot guns and slower development.

[kcartlidge]

I do both C# and Go so have no axe to grind here. Just two small points though.

> .NET needs a runtime

It doesn't. With a single command .NET Core can produce stand-alone single-file cross-platform deployables needing no SDK, Framework, runtime, or other dependency on the server.

> Go at least partially solves some of those problems, by being compiled, having decent performance, somewhat rich ecosystem and passable package management, all while the language remains usable.

It does, and I've been a big fan of Go for a fair few years now. However every point made in that sentence applies equally to .NET too.

The one area where Go beats C# (and most others) hands-down for me is the build time. It's a whole order of magnitude (possibly several) faster than most alternatives.

[erik_seaberg]

GC tuning is painful, but it’s quicker and more reliable than rewriting code hoping for same result.

[KronisLV]

Partially agreed, many times it's just a patch over a codebase that's stuck only running on JDK 8 - people expect tuning to be sufficient when the code is slowly rotting.

I'd argue that most systems that won't die out eventually will need a rewrite, or alternatively, in the modern day we'll see more and more polyglotic systems popping up.

Therefore it always makes sense to explore the best options for a particular bit of development, regardless of whether it's Node, Python, Java, Go or something else.

[asadawadia]

>systems level programming or embedded development

Like building what?