[obviouslynotme]

Go has always been a Java, C#, Python, and Ruby killer. It has not and never will be a C or C++ killer. C is the language of libraries and embedded, neither of which Go is good for. C++ is the language of large systems that need extreme control over resource allocation. Go is not good for this either.

[ledauphin]

I agree with you that Go does not replace C or C++, but I strongly disagree that Go is an obvious replacement for most uses of Python, C#, Java or Ruby, all of which are, frankly, _much_ higher level languages than Go.

Go gets used for two main reasons that I've been able to observe:

1) a desire for a very specific type of concurrency 2) a desire for a fast compiled language with a minimalistic feature set that scales well to large teams.

Switching to Go from one of those languages is very much giving up a kitchen sink for a purpose-built tool. It may be the right decision under lots of different circumstances, but it doesn't directly compete with any of the languages you've mentioned because of how minimalistic it tries to be.

Overall, in fact, I think Go does something far more interesting: it's legitimately an attempt to carve out a whole separate niche for software development. Whether it's ultimately been successful there is for a different comment thread, though. :)

[obviouslynotme]

Go has always been a high level language, and is even more so now with generics. I would even argue that Go, correctly done, is halfway between the Java tier and the Lisp tier. Due to Go's quick and easy parsability, generation, and compilation. It is very easy to write tools for Go. Code generation and struct tags are even part of the standard, but very people use them beyond the basic serialization libraries. It's not quite lisp, but it is very close in many ways.

Very few people rewrite projects. Most change happens by new projects adopting one language over another. The fact that I hear of Python rewrites to Go is honestly amazing.

[tptacek]

It is too easy for people to forget that C was not always the language of "libraries and embedded", and that writing large systems programs in C, of the sort that nobody would realistically consider writing that way in 2022, was a norm. Displacing C doesn't just mean rewriting existing C dependencies, but also changing the balance of decisions about which new programs to write in C. Go has had a tremendous amount of impact there. Without Go, Docker would almost certainly be a large ball of C code.

[wizofaus]

Is Go really killing C# though? I've rewritten Go components in C# (the initial version only had basic functionality requirements, but as they expanded, Go made less and less sense given the rest of our codebase), but can't readily imagine wanting to rewrite C# in Go. Maybe once they add proper exceptions...

[vsnf]

My current project was switched from C# to Go almost 2 years ago. It was a management decision, and while the team all generally has found something or another to like about Go, we all miss C#.

[obviouslynotme]

No. C# is usually used by Microsoft shops, and half the reason to use C# is so you can use Visual Studio.

[wizofaus]

That implies that if a better alternative to VS came along, C# developers wouldn't choose it! I certainly would, for one, and I'm a long-term VS user, well aware of its failings (but also yet to come across another IDE that's noticeably superior. And coding with a text editor and command line compiler is something I spent 10+ years doing when it was all that was available, and nothing I have any great hankering to go back to - even if it's something I still resort to as an emergency measure, e.g. when on some remote system with text-only access etc.)

[obviouslynotme]

The only IDE better than Visual Studio is probably one of the Smalltalk IDEs, but the languages are too niche these days. It's a shame none of the large companies wants to back them.