[corresation]

Do you mean specifically why there is a dedicated Chinese following in particular, or just in general?

Go is a clean, intuitive language with a very robust supporting ecosystem and a strong concurrency model. It builds fast, small code and makes quick work of big problems. Why shouldn't there be a big following of one of the better platforms to come out in a long time?

[agentultra]

My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

The runtime kind of makes it a silo; ie: hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

Of course if I am mistaken or there's something being done to address such a scenario then I will be much happier seeing more and more infrastructure code shipping in Go.

[masklinn]

> My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

It's not. It's a new Java, not a new C++.

> ie: hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

More or less impossible: GC and goroutines are not optional so you'd need to cleanly setup and shutdown the Go runtime. You'd have to embed Go as you do Lua or Python.

[slashclee]

> > My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

> It's not. It's a new Java, not a new C++.

Not according to the Go developers. "Go is a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind." http://golang.org/ref/spec#Introduction

[masklinn]

It's not the first time they could be quoted with completely off-their-rocker statements.

[mratzloff]

Go has the same FFI language that most languages do: C.

http://golang.org/cmd/cgo/

[masklinn]

Wrong way around. By "bind languages to it" agentultra talks about using Go from other languages, not using C from Go.

[corresation]

>hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

Go has absurdly simple FFI through, as mratzloff mentioned, C. This is self-promotion and apologies, but see my submission history for two examples.