Choosing Go

There are plenty of languages in the system programming space nowadays: some are well established, such as C and C++; some form a wave of newcomers, such as Zig, Rust, and Odin; and others claim the title of “C/C++ killer,” with their pledges of impressive performance.

Sure, we can use all of them and achieve outstanding results. Still, we could fall into hidden traps such as a steep learning curve, high cognitive load, a lack of community and support, inconsistent APIs with constant breaking changes, and a lack of adoption.

Go’s design philosophy emphasizes simplicity, expressiveness, robustness, and efficiency. Its support for concurrency and strong dependency management, as well as its focus on composition, make it a compelling choice for system programming. Its creators aimed to build a language that provides powerful building blocks without unnecessary complexity, which makes writing, reading, understanding, and maintaining system-level code...