Why exactly is Go so special? For a compiled language it's not very fast and doesn't seem to be making much traction. I think people simply like it because of it's Bell Labs heritage and pretty syntax.
Since the sibling comments already addressed everything else, I'll talk about this one:
> For a compiled language it's not very fast
This is essentially true, _but_ a lot of Go users are coming from Python, JavaScript, and maybe Ruby and Go is much faster. Additionally, it comes _close enough_ to Java while typically having a much smaller memory footprint that it really performs quite well in a cloud environment.
But the memory footprint is amazing. I've got three servers plus up to 10 test environments running on one small VPS (Virtual Private Server), and everything runs as smooth as can be; memory usage stays below 1GB, leaving enough space for the db server. In a previous job, we had a Java/Tomcat server, and it was filling up memory without doing much. I've inherited a Python server in my current job, and if you don't take care, it slowly grows to 4GB. Go is really a blessing for the back-end.
The problem is, that wasn't really well advertised or understood, so people would see a Java program using lots of memory and assume that this is how much it really required. The elasticity wasn't apparent. These days the JVM can kick off background collections from time to time to reduce memory usage if the app is idle. However it still won't aggressively collect if the app is running because, again, if you haven't capped it then it figures that it's better to serve requests than do lots of "pointless" GC work.
Fundamentally with GC there's a throughput vs memory usage tradeoff. Go faces the same issue which is why GOGC exists:
But, yeah, my experience with Go matches yours. It's really amazingly light on resource usage.
What do you mean by this? By what metrics and what would qualify as making traction? Many companies use Go and many prominent and widely used open source projects are written in Go.
> it's Bell Labs heritage
I have never met a person (in person, offline) who has cared about this at all.
> pretty syntax
One of the most common things you hear as a knock against Go are things that explicitly do not lead to "pretty" syntax, such as its error handling.
Overall, your comment confuses me.
> I have never met a person (in person, offline) who has cared about this at all.
People care about it because the language has the Bell Labs "feel". They don't care about it the way a dog breeder would care about a dog's ancestry.
(And of those who care about the "feel", some view it as a positive, others as a negative...)
I'm not attacking, I am honestly asking: What does that mean? That it feels C-like? Or something different? A lot of languages are C-like in syntax, so Go is not exactly unique in that aspect.
Contrast with e.g. Haskell which is based on the belief you can always improve some code by making it more general, or Rust on the belief you can improve it by making it safer, or Java that you can improve it by breaking it down into smaller chunks.
Languages carry aesthetic values. Most are aren't committed to them above literally all else - we all want our code to be somewhat simple and general and safe and isolated etc - but other than the most kitchen sink-y of them (C++, JavaScript) they have priorities among those which show through. (And even in those you can find some, muddled as they are.)
The difference was that C was written by people who were trying to write an OS, and they had to create a language that was able to handle all the odd things involved, like writing directly to hardware. Pascal really didn't want you to do that.
I'm not saying that Go lets you talk directly to hardware - I don't know whether it does or not. But I think that Go has the "get out of the programmers way and let them write code" approach more than, say, Haskell, or even Rust. That (plus the C-like syntax) probably is the Bell Labs feel.
1. wide range of OS's you can target
2. no dependency on libc, you can build and copy over a binary to a machine and it will work
3. fast compiles
4. amazing stdlib, makes writing no to low dependency code very attainable
(imo) there's very little reason to start a new backend project in ruby/python/js when you can just use go and get better performance
> doesn't seem to be making much traction
Its one of the most in demand languages, at least according to linkedin in my area.
…really? Go seems blazing fast to me…
1.17 saw a major performance boost because of the switch from stack-based to register-based ABI for go function calls [1]. The release notes claimed a 5% average improvement, but benhoyt (in that discussion) has benchmarks showing much greater improvement for GoAWK.