Argument "that language was not designed for that!" is valid almost anytime anyone tries to criticize a programming language. Go was designed within Google for Google. Where your system has millions of lines of code and thousands of developers work on them constantly. So they thought about three things: compilation speed, memory management and concurrency. Go compiles fast, so you can iterate quickly. This requires giving up most of the compilation safety checks. They can be done by static analysis tools in parallel. Explicit memory management means, you can sometimes optimize this 0.05% memory on your program. This means a lot, when you run your code on million machines. Concurrency isn't hard in Go, but explicit memory management makes it harder than in Erlang for example (in Erlang, you have "share nothing" policy). Go is also very simple, so one developer won't be surprised by other developer using some obscure feature.That being said. I wouldn't recommend using Go outside of Google, Facebook or Microsoft. It solves problems, that companies and developers usually don't have. If you need always running and quickly evolving software - there is Erlang and Elixir. If you need guarantees on correctness, use static typing from Haskell. If you can resign from some guarantees to have grater control on memory, there is Rust. If you are writing in browser, there is Elm. If you want to easily transition from OO to functional programming - try Scala. If you need to prototype app for your startup quickly - there is Ruby.
Every popular language has its purpose and its trade-offs. Rust isn't strictly better than Go, but with high probability, it is better than Go for your problem.
pmilot|10 years ago