You're certainly right that it's a possible and viable alternative. The reason I didn't go that way is quite simple: I always try and do my best to avoid external dependencies. One of the reason I really love Go is its ease of deployment thanks to its lack of dependencies: I love the idea of being just one scp away from running in staging/production; no more, no less.

I know many people won't agree with that, and there are definitely good reasons not to; and still, as far as I'm concerned, minimizing the complexity of my software stack means there's one less thing that I'll have to worry about, and at the end of the day, that is really quite the upside.