I've been seeing a lot of references to this across youtube, reddit etc for a new experimental language. Is google putting their full weight behind this like Go or is the virality just incidental?
Lots of people are interested in replacing C++. They disagree about what the replacement should be, to some extent because what they think is wrong with C++ can be quite different.
This is a team of people with serious C++ backgrounds, who explicitly are interested in this as a successor to C++. Some of these are people who worked on P2137 which is the "Goals and priorities" paper that the committee explicitly rejected for C++ 20, so they know what they think C++ should be, and they know WG21 doesn't want that, so if they do want it they're going to need a separate vehicle to get there.
Also they're far from finished, so there's the attraction that Carbon could be whatever it is you want, while something like Rust has decided what it is.
This is a team of people with serious C++ backgrounds, who explicitly are interested in this as a successor to C++. Some of these are people who worked on P2137 which is the "Goals and priorities" paper that the committee explicitly rejected for C++ 20, so they know what they think C++ should be, and they know WG21 doesn't want that, so if they do want it they're going to need a separate vehicle to get there.
Also they're far from finished, so there's the attraction that Carbon could be whatever it is you want, while something like Rust has decided what it is.