[pjmlp]

This is not true.

There are companies selling development kits with GC enabled system programming languages, like Oberon, for embedded development.

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

Granted, ARM Cortex-M3 and NXP LPC2000 microcontrollers are more powerful than typical Arduino hardware, but one does not need to target all possible hardware out there.

[smilekzs]

http://technical.io/ even managed to run Node.JS on a Cortex-M3, but in the deeply-embedded world where performance/$ and real-time constraints matters, having a always-GC system like Golang (especially considering it's designed for cached cores) doesn't sound very promising.

However I did look Golang because it makes concurrency (quite important in embedded programming) easy. Now with Rust...