To point 2) I fully agree, Go should be a great choice for desktop applications. One match I think is especially good, that is Gtk based development with Go. Gtk is one of the few UI toolkits which has been designed around a pure C API, so Go is a great match with it. Also, with Gtk the Go applications are reasonably portable to Linux, macOS and Window. I have used Go+Gtk and found it a pleseant experience.