On the flip side I have yet to find a person who’s familiar with sum types (e.g., Maybe, Option, Result) that finds the golang approach even remotely acceptable.
I don't LIKE it, but it's acceptable.
I have been working with Rust since 2015 (albeit not professionally, but a lot of side projects) and love it.
But I also dabbled into go the last couple of months and while it has its warts, I see it as another tool in the tool-belt with different trade-offs.
Error handling is weird, but it's working, so shrug
As I pointed out I think Rust does it better with its types error handling. That isn’t too relevant for me though as Rust will probably never seem any form of adoption in my part of the world. I think Zig may have a better chance considering how interoperable it is with C, but around here the C++ folks are simply sticking with C++.
I disagree. Typescript, C# and Java are terrible languages (as are Python/Ruby/etc. in other ways). Golang is bad by OP's standards but there's nothing wrong with it gaining ground on those languages.
Besides it's also easier to convert a codebase to Rust from Golang than Typescript or C#/Java.
I’d frankly pick Python for most things though. It’s a terrible language, everyone knows it’s terrible but it gets things done and everyone can work with it. I view performance issues a little different than most people though. To me hitting the wall where you can no longer “make do” with C/Zig replacements of Python bottlenecks means you’ve made it. The vast majority of software projects will never be successful enough to get there.
However, I do agree that it could be argued that Golang has become much more of a Java and C# alternative. Looks like Rust will be shoehorned into C++ and C spaces, but it remains to be seen how successful it will be as an C alternative. Seems like many fans of C are quite resistant or even outright dislike Rust.
I've been working on one [1].
But gosh, does go make it hard.
While I much prefer Python as a language, Go wins against Python by having a fresher ecosystem, with a higher baseline for type safety. Still pretty low with respect to Rust or mypy/pyright with highest settings, but much better than any of the Python frameworks I've had to deal with.
It's a Google solution to Google scale problems, e.g. codebases with millions of lines of code worked on by thousands of developers. Problems that few people that have an Opinion on Go will ever encounter.