Zig is just as much mental overhead. C and C++ are too, but most of us have amortized that cost already. Go is already a legacy language that probably shouldn't be used in production in most cases.
This is objectively not true. “Go feels legacy to me and I wouldn’t use it in production in most cases” is reasonable, if you feel that way, but “legacy language” has a definition, and Go isn’t a legacy language.
On top of this, in its excessive caution about adding features while balancing incidental and essential complexity, it just hasn't evolved and kept up to meet the kinds of demands modern languages do like Zig, Rust, C3, Carbon and Odin, and while these languages were innovating, Go was still catching up to 10-20 years ago at any given moment. It was already kind of a weird middle ground, not quite as high level as Ruby, not quite as low level as C++, and this slow catch up game plus lack of keeping up was, for me at least, just the nail in the coffin. But all of this together makes me personally think that it's just not a great fit for most scenarios, but also that it seemed to have started off on the wrong foot with itself and the wider programming community.
That's my take at least.
Is it really fair to compare golang to languages that haven’t hit 1.0? Would you sincerely use zig or carbon in production before Go?
I just feel like “it’s better than the alternatives” is still true, and will be for a while. I would love if software wasn't best written in slightly older languages, but even c++ had growing pains for years.
If you compared it technically and semantically to stuff like swift or kotlin, i think the case would be stronger, but it’s hard to take production concerns seriously when comparing it to zig. (I make a monthly donation to zig, but i wouldn’t use it at work)
Honestly every language has warts, there are no perfect languages. I just personally don't like Go, mostly for the reasons stated above as well as in a recent article I can't find anymore but read a few weeks ago, mostly complaining about its well known ergonomics issues.
But yeah it's fine to use in prod for the same reason Java 6 and IE 6 were for a long time: nothing really matters but money when you're doing work work.