What motivates people to pick Go instead of the others which are more stable and seasoned or more performant ?
Those are some of the main reasons... it's great for pushing data with relatively low overhead, and relatively high safety.
Compared to Rust, you could do very similar, but the language is a much larger break from what most are used to.
Compared to Java/C#, you don't have a relatively large runtime to install, not nearly as portable. I really like C# myself, but it's not for all use cases, and the framework need make it a poorer choice for infrastructure tooling. Also the concurrency model is more transparent in go... in C#, for example, you can use pooling techniques, but they take more thought and planning. Java has a history of huge overhead and tooling as well.
Compared to scripted languages, not worth even considering.
It really depends on your needs, but the fact is that Go and Rust are fairly new, but build with specific needs in mind and do most of them better than other options, with better safety and more transparent ease of use. Go tends to be better for networking/communications, and Rust tends to be better with interacting on system internals.
This is from a conscientious observer. I haven't had a good use case for either, but may have one for go coming up, so looking forward to that.
I wrote my own zero allocation xml parser in Go the other day and it is 2-3 times faster than the standard library. It was not difficult to do mainly because I could reference what the standard library was doing. The code is easy to read and understand.
I code and test on a Windows box and I deploy to Linux without any changes.
You could say the same about Python, but not really. With Python I have to maintain the Python environment anywhere I want to run my software. With Go I only have to maintain it where I compile the code, so the final machine where it's deployed could even not have Go installed and still run my Go silly tools.
C# is fine on Windows, Linux support is second priority.
C/C++ takes a bit more work and skill (IMO).
Java is probably very widespread, but less popular from a publicity standpoint.
Go is equally stable on Win and Linux, decent standard library, easy to pick up for Python, Ruby, Java, C or C++ devs, has a simple deployment model, had a good concurrency model, and provides fast builds. It has its detractors due to features not in other languages, but fits the need for a wide variety of others.
Multiple versions? The JVM is generally backwards compatible. It's pretty rare where an "old version" it is actually required. Plus. Java 8 has been out for over 2.5 years, which is practically an eternity in development time. In the event you do actually need multiple versions, setting JAVA_HOME and maybe your PATH is hardly rocket science.
There's a HUGE class of problems that you simply don't have by using go...
Don't get me wrong... I really like C# (not a fan of Java), but I wouldn't consider using it for a lot of the places where Go or Rust are used very well. Frankly, I'd just assume use node for any higher level stuff, Go for anything node isn't a good enough fit for, and Rust for anything system (Ie os/hardware) related.
A fat jar is a single runnable binary. It makes deploying Java super simple and is roughly equivalent to Go's single binary.
- easy concurrency with CSP/channels
- decent documentation
- cgo makes it almost trivial to link to C dependencies
- strong UTF-8 support, native distinction between bytes and "Runes"
- multiple return values make it easy to deal with return values and error codes in the same function instead of having to resort to a by-reference parameter to capture one or the other
- has a lot of the simplicity of C, with a lot less of the ambiguity
- gets a lot of love from Google, substantial improvements in almost every release
But to the general thrust of your question, because that's the problem Google was trying to solve? The built in libraries make it quite easy to write applications that speak HTTP/HTTPS in a reasonably scalable way.
Rust will probably be comparable in the future, but isn't quite there yet. C/C++ remains a bit difficult, although it should become a lot easier if the C++ networking TS makes it in.
Like Java, it is not a good choice... but people stick to what they know.
For scripting systems that are simple to write, Python or Ruby are quite great.
If you want some OO but better, Scala or OCaml are around for a long time and deal with concurrency better.
If you really want concurrency and parallelism, Elixir/Erlang are there and Pony is growing slowly.
They are all better than Go at what Go aim for, without the hurtful decisions. And they are better supported on a wide amount of systems.
So translated into objective facts that statement is just "Go is cooler than Java."
At DockerCon EU a couple years ago someone who worked in VC firm mentioned that every startup they were talking to was choosing Go. Go is better than Python in some cases, better than Java in others... but in many cases you could just use Python or just use Java and it'd be just fine. Often Python is better (much more libraries) or Java is better (much more libraries, and has generics unlike Go's "let's reinvent all of Java 1.0's faults" design).
But Python and Java aren't trendy.