[pjmlp]

Real systems programming would be possible with a little more help.

Meaning a few more operations exposed in unsafe.

The problem is that the average developers never saw Oberon line of languages or are unaware how much of libc is actually written in Assembly.

Maybe with Go 1.5 fully re-written in Go, it will be easier to sell this scenario.

[orbifold]

According to Github 8.4% of glibc is written in assembly. You would actually expect that to be an over estimate, since assembly is guaranteed to be machine dependent.

[ahh]

I suspect this is a significant underestimate: glibc heavily relies on generated assembly (they have a set of scripts to generate boilerplate asm functions for system calls) and inline assembly (which gets defined once, probably counted as C by github, and used many times.)