[Rochus]

> low level stuff like parsers, small KV stores and some network programming

That's not actually "low level"; you can pretty well do all of this using JS or TS. Go is very well suited for these kind of topics, and you can master it within a year. I don't see a necessity or clear advantage to learn C++ for these kinds of topics (mastering C++ takes 3 to 5 years).

> I have the FOMO of not learning to manage memory

There is no reason for this. It would be different if you would like to develop resource constrained embedded systems (those with less than a MB of RAM).

[lazy_afternoons]

what about systems like game engines and softwares like figma. People still use cpp there. Do you see go or go-like languages taking more in this space ?

[Rochus]

Well, if you intend to contribute to a game engine written in C++, it is of course of advantage if you can program in C++. But there are also game engines written in Go and other garbage collected languages (see e.g. https://www.dragonflydb.io/game-dev/engines/golang). There are also games written in Go. By the end of the day it's mostly a question of preference. As of Figma, as far as I understand it runs as Wasm; so essentially it can be written in any language which can compile to Wasm (which includes Go).