> Go is closer in spirit to C than to any other language
This is certainly not the case for the way that I personally think about C. Perhaps there are two "spirits" of C; two ways that people think about it:
1. C is small, C is simple, C lets you write useful programs with good performance while keeping the language itself simple. For this view of C, I can see Go being a compelling alternative.
2. C is a bare-metal environment for implementing low-level systems code like VMs, garbage collectors, JITs, and other runtimes. It imposes nothing and never gets in your way. For this view of C (which is how I think of it), Go is not an alternative. If you are inclined to disagree, answer for me: why is the Go runtime and GC not itself written in Go?
I think that perhaps the difference between these two views of C leads to some of the disagreement about whether Go is an alternative for C.
Yes it can, the proof is the security software that is written to do that in C/C++. Nobody is saying that the protection will protect you over all possible buffer exploits.
From Computer Science point of view if you are writing bug verification tools in an unsafe language, there is no guarantee the verification tool is giving safe results back.
The same unsafe constructs can cause memory corruption in the verification tool and lead to a behavior where the wrong decisions are taken.
So the fact that many C verification tools are written in C itself does not proof anything about how safe the language could be.
For me personally C could be much better if:
- There was no automatic decay from arrays into pointers (call an explicit operation to do so, like &a[0])
- There was a proper string type available
- Arrays were bound checked (with optional disabling of bound checking, like many other languages offer)
I don't see how to easily implement a garbage collector in a language that doesn't let you precisely control garbage collected allocations (i.e. making all GC allocations immediately apparent and visible, instead of using escape analysis), for the same heap you're allocating into. You'd have to reason very carefully about the colors of your objects in order to ensure correctness in the presence of allocating into the same heap you're in the process of marking or sweeping or copying. (This is not the same problem as incremental collection—with incremental collection you can count on barriers to handle it for you.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it's doable with some really clever tricks, but it doesn't seem worth it in terms of maintainability. Just use C or C++.
Oberon's GC is written in Oberon in some implementations and Assembly in others, but the SYSTEM package is more powerful in low level primitives than what Go offers in its unsafe package.
Edit: Forgot to mention that it does not do escape analysis.
Go functions body may be implemented as asm. The standard math pkg is a great example of this feature.
http://golang.org/src/pkg/math/
Considering all of these features there isnt really a whole lot about Go's semantics that prohibit it from being used in many of the low level projects that are typically written in C/C++.
The point isn't that you can't do unsafe pointer fiddling in Go—of course you can. The issue is that you don't have direct control over heap allocation. The language will heap allocate for you in ways that are not obvious.
In Go it is straight-forward to call assembly or C code, so it is well possible to implement projects that need low-level functions. In particular it is no magic to manually allocate memory and handle all memory yourself.
Are there actually popular GC implementations that don't use any assembly?
It's increasingly possible to write Rust code without needing the runtime at all; this is what's enabling the current effort to rewrite the runtime from C++ to Rust itself. However, there are some restrictions imposed if you choose to shed the runtime: no use of garbage-collected pointers, and concurrency will be either unavailable or somewhat restricted (i.e. mapping tasks to OS threads rather than green threads).
Writing the Go runtime in Go would require the similar ability to do without all the services that are currently provided by the runtime. That is, unless you want your runtime to recursively require itself to infinite depth. :) I'm sure it's theoretically possible, but considering that two of the language's largest selling points are concurrency and memory safety via GC, a theoretical runtime-less dialect of Go would be so near to C that it might not really be worth the effort.
Not an expert, but my understanding was that most of those were either from bindings to unsafe functions (e.g. C++ functions from LLVM) or false positives from the compiler dealing with the 'unsafe' keyword in the code its compiling.
I agree with everything except Go is fun or the assertion that it combines best of both dynamic and statically compiled languages. It is a minimalistic get-it-done language, I would say it is 'modern java'. There are no aha moments that you experience while learning go. It always feels like - ya, I have seen that. Go did not take the best of the pre-existing languages, it took the minimal set that made sense to the designers; for example: it omitted 'best' features like map, reduce and filter in favour of 'plain old boring' for loops. I wonder how many programmers can wake up in the morning and say to themselves - wow, I am going to program in Go today.
Go's aha moment is its low cognitive overhead. It eschews power and conciseness for clarity, everywhere. It takes the exact opposite approach to functional languages, preferring boring simplicity to powerful but cryptic abstraction.
It turns out that an uncompromising devotion to clarity is quite powerful in its own right. It's not right for every use case, but highly compelling for many.
You're mistaking familiarity for simplicity. You cannot get much simpler than the lambda calculus, full stop. It has three concepts--lambdas, variables and application--and one evaluation rule. That is all. The rest of the language features are almost always just a thin layer over this.
Even when you add types, it's still an amazingly simple model. And the types do not generally affect the runtime behavior of code at all.
Functional languages are the very picture of something simple but not necessarily easy. Go, at least for you, is the opposite: it's easy because it's similar to what you're used to, but it also has quite a bit of surface area.
My impression is that Go vies for simplicity of implementation over simplicity of semantics. It is a very operational sort of language. Its goal is to make the how clear--the code reflects what it does.
Languages like Haskell, on the other hand, are completely the opposite. Haskell values simplicity of semantics over simplicity of implementation. It is a very denotational sort of language. Its goal is to make the what clear--the code reflects what it means.
It's a difference in philosophies, certainly, just not quite in the way you construed it to be.
Exceedingly simple semantics combining to form a difficult-to-use language is often called a "Turing Tar Pit," a place where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Conway's Game of Life is even simpler than the lambda calculus, and people build all sorts of amazing things in it, but examples like a calculator that outputs human-readable digits are circus tricks.
I think some of us already had that with the first Java versions. Actually, Go looks a lot like old Java versions, minus the VM, plus Goroutines/channels, and static duck typing.
I have written a fair share of Go code and ultimately it's a very boring, but predictable language. If it builds a larger ecosystem, it will not be much different than a Java that compiles to native code. Without some of the advantages of the JVM.
(What we are really seeing here on HN lately is a hype, pretty much like node.js and FP before. Go has a better chance to stick, because it has a good steward.)
I kind of agree with that, but Java really needed a reboot. It's more a cultural thing than a technological one.
But I'm actually a bit cynical about that. Pretty soon the framework peddlers will descend on Go just as they have descended on Java, JavaScript and Python. Once again a couple of switch statements will be replaced by tens of thousands of lines of framework code.
It will be called "beautiful" and "elegant" and "DRY" and those still complaining about the bloat will be told that they don't have to use the features they don't need, but not knowing all the features and all the hooks and all the optimization tricks will once again make you look incompetent and behind the times.
Yeah, it's the Java culture and the stuff bolted on top by Sun and other business software vendors in an effort to keep relevant and appeal to CIO:s.
But I don't agree with the prediction:
Python and JavaScript aren't really drowning in BS produced by architecture astronauts. It exists but it's not prevalent.
- "Write once, run everywhere." as the sibling poster mentions. I can build on my Mac, deploy on whatever the server platform is.
Snapshot and release builds of our build server are distributed via a Nexus-managed repository. So, everyone codes against exactly the same dependencies, regardless of the platform.
- Hotswapping/JRebel.
- Good interoperability with other languages. E.g. the Typesafe folks implemented Akka in Scala. Java gets it for (well, almost) free.
- Easy monitoring and instrumentation.
Obviously, there are downsides as well, such as startup times (twofold: starting the VM and Hotspot detection/compilation), preset heap size, expensive JNI (native interface), etc.
Except that Java code typically runs as fast or faster in the JVM than compiled Go code[1]. Of course, Go is still new and gc and gcc-go will be optimized further.
But Java bytecode execution is definitely not slow and usually within 2x the execution time of a C implementation, which is faster than the vast majority of other language implementations.
[1] At least in the language benchmarks game. Yes, I know that microbenchmarks are not representative, etc. etc. etc. (Until your favorite language is faster ;).)
Well-defined semantics, including for "errors" like integer overflow or null dereference.
A community that's converged on a deterministic, crossplatform way of representing library dependencies (maven).
An ABI that includes a notion of objects, which makes cross-language interoperability with objects easier (though counterbalanced by not having a cross-language notion of functions).
Go's aha moment IMHO is at the edges. If you have built a complex application (250k+ lines) in C++, Python or Java you know about the quiet undignified pains those projects often suffer.
- Horrible build systems (and horrible build times)
--- Go compiles fast, and the compile and dependency system is baked in
- Impossible to untangle dependencies (don't ever remove an include, who knows where it is used)
--- Go forces you to either use a dependency or remove it, stopping dependency cruft from ever building up
- Nightmare deploys (system wide assumptions)
--- Go deploys with a single platform dependent binary, it is absolutely awesome
- Inconsistent formatting, self-directed standards on formatting.
--- Gofmt is the one true format, heck, even some bad formatting won't compile (try to uncuddle your else to see)
- Inconsistent build systems and build system quality, made worse by using libraries and systems that have their OWN build systems.
--- Go get combined with its include system (use it or lose it) really let you tie together systems in a sane way without any custom build routes.
- Dealing with modern concurrency
--- Go having built in channel communication makes many problems trivial, and allows new methods of abstraction (goes to Go's model of composition).
I'll take Java as an example, since I only use Python for short scripts.
- Horrible build systems (and horrible build times)
Maven is a great build system, Java has good compile times, and most modern Java IDEs have incremental compilation. And you can specify versions of dependencies, rather than having to maintain a list of SHA1 hashes of versions considered to be stable.
(don't ever remove an include, who knows where it is used)
This is primarily a problem in C/C++, where one can indirectly get the correct dependencies by accident. Most modern compiled languages don't have this problem.
Go forces you to either use a dependency or remove it, stopping dependency cruft from ever building up
Which can be annoying for debugging. I'd rather have my IDE or linter give warnings.
- Nightmare deploys (system wide assumptions)
'mvn package', it's also easy to configure maven to build an archive with dependencies, configuration files, or whatever you'd like to be in a deploy.
In fact, deployments are even easier than in Go, since my package built on OS X will also deploy on a Linux server. My colleagues use different platforms (a mixture of Linux, Windows, and OS X) and it's never a problem.
- Inconsistent formatting, self-directed standards on formatting.
It's good that the Go team made a standard formatting. That said, my employer has a default layout. It's a matter of importing an XML file in Eclipse or IntelliJ and everything is in company layout (yay).
- Inconsistent build systems and build system quality
Nearly every Java library is available via Central Maven Repository. Including versioning :), meaning that if upstream changes their API, it's not your problem. In contrast to Go repository/packages.
Dealing with modern concurrency
Ever heard of Actor models and Akka? Composable concurrency, across more than one machine. With supervision, routing, etc.
You are right, it is just as simple as using Java, Akka, Maven, working at a company with a good standard formatting and structure and being forced to use an IDE with conditional compilation and only using packages that support Maven and put themselves in the Maven Ultra-Centralized Repo.
Or you could use Go and the text editor of your choice.
Simplicity in design is still a panacea, only good programmers can do it on non trivial systems. Go will allow for better clarity, but beautiful code will not write itself.
Low cognitive overhead is also good for your future self, that will have to maintain the 'clever' mess which you wrote in a hurry ...
In my experience so far, the abstractions that Go offers for writing concurrent code are very nice and easy to understand, and deploying it is really good - it generates static binaries, which you simply upload where you need them. It is a very practical language.
Thanks for reading my article. It is my opinion that Go is fun, but it's just that, an opinion. I'm glad we have the diversity in programming languages that allows us to pick what we like (esp. when it comes to the server). Best.
I do look forward to programming in Go. My day gig is working with PHP and horribly written Python (globals everywhere). Go is, simply put, refreshing. So much, that I'm moving away from Python as my go to web language to Go.
Spoken like someone who hasn't written much Go, or at least hasn't used it for what it's best at. I suggest you read Effective Go and try writing some concurrent applications. It's aha moments are plentiful once you realize the power in the simplicity.
I have written Go code, and what the language offers is no different from java.util.concurrent, .NET TPL, C++ Cilk, PPL, and many other frameworks offer.
Goroutines aren't really the selling point. It's simple enough to implement similar concepts in any language.
It's the combination of a set of complimentary features, the maturity and the stability that really sells Go.
Theory: when a language is often hyped, it means few are adopting it. Consider: lisp. In contrast: PHP, objective-C. I'll be interested in checking back in 5 years, to see what happened.
But I admit, fast startup times and coroutines are big wins.
Also, multicore is late. Dual-core x86 in 2004, and in 2013 we are still on quad-core. With a doubling every two years, we'd be at 32 cores. Instead, today's trend is toward the less powerful ARM. We do have "multicore" in GPUs (1000's). I've long thought that processor evolution will be similar to organs in a body or firms in a market-place, i.e. with special-purpose silicon, like video decoders etc. Which is what we have with SoC.
Yeah, the limitation isn't hardware, but utilisation thereof. Maybe Go will change that; but I don't see it touting concurrent code as becoming trivial - just easier. (maybe I'm wrong?)
Server loads are typically embarrassingly parallelizable, e.g. serving concurrent web requests. I mean, consider, are you maxing out all 8 cores? Multicore utilisation is hard, in general. So desktop cpus pretty much stalled at quad-core (I expect ARM chips are doing likewise as we speak).
Concurrency with messaging is rather trivial, because it does away with the vast majority of the hard parts (but not all of them). Go is easy in that regard for the same reasons Erlang is easy .
I looked into Erlang in some depth, and found its concurrency ability was due to shared-nothing modules (which smalltalk also has), which I think you refer to with "messaging". Race conditions can still occur, which I guess you include with "not all of them". Plus, in Erlang this was found to not address all concurrency problems, and so a software transactional database is included as standard.
Looking at the details, I don't think general concurrency is a solved problem. Looking at the results, if it was, we'd have much better utilisation of multi-core architectures by now than we do. For example, 32 core x86, clocked ultra-low, for extraordinarily low power consumption.
Actually, another issue is that message passing might work better with cores with their own RAM, so the modules can work independently.
I think there's a huge amount of kool-aid around concurrency "solutions" - functional programming, erlang, and now Go. Because concurrency is so valuable, if Go really does make it trivial, we it should quickly dominate all other languages. But it seems to me that concurrency is still a hard problem.
As someone who has shipped two production systems in Erlang, one for a fortune 100 company, another for a floundering former tech giant, I don't think it is nearly as kool-aid as you think.
It is out there, a lot, used in trading houses, used in running credit reports, used for facebook chat, used to route cell phone calls, used as the back-end component to gobs of system (CouchDB, RIAK).
Erlang has a very similar culture background to Go, it wasn't built for Academia, it was built to solve issues right in front of its creators, real world problems they struggle with everyday, inside Google and Erickson respectively.
Both are un-sexy, get-er-done type languages. Erlang has found happy homes all over the place, and I have no doubt Go will do at least as well -- most likely far better.
Go is the oncoming storm. Been writing in Go for an year now. My dev config: API server + AngularJS. Before Go, I had never done serious web development(Android Developer), so I don't know the difference, but when I see fellow developers talking about concurrency and API's with respect and awe, I giggle inside a little.
Previously I have also done GUI programming with Python, and the freedom from: not worrying about indentation, slow speed and default sync behavior is relieving.
Talking about verbosity is a bit dodgy since it also depends on the skills of the programmer. But, at-least in my case, I think my Go code is less verbose then I would have written in Python. One of the main reasons for that is the highly accessible type system.
Yes, it somehow manages to be less verbose than Python, while still being very readable. Sure, you do leave something on the table, but its a fair trade.
Less verbose than Python -- interesting (not that Python is "verbose"!). I've always heard Go was almost as concise as Python, but not quite. Can you give a couple of multi-line Go code examples that are more concise than the equivalent Python?
I found the ability to define a method on a slice/array to be less verbose than the equivalent inherit/delegation setup in Ruby, though I can't speak for Python. http://nathany.com/good
I can't imagine a more concise syntax for automatic delegation than Go's embedding.
> When I look at Ruby, I see C++11 in different clothes. Twenty years of cruft, and still adding features that nobody needs. A new language is a fresh start.
That's not necessarily a good thing. Those '20 years of cruft' represent battle-hardened code. Those features have been requested - maybe not by you, but communities the size of Ruby, PHP, Python don't do these things on a whim.
Yes, Ruby/Python have strong ecosystems from their 20+ years of existence. Go's third-party packages are still young by comparison. But sometimes it's good to rethink past assumptions, even if it means writing code from scratch.
The feature linked is Ruby refinements, for which much of the community was against. And note, I did not say refinements weren't wanted, clearly they were wanted by someone. I said they aren't needed.
I suppose if you're writing a Triple-A video game or real-time/firmware? (neither of which are "server")
Outside of those cases, Rob Pike has given some discussion on interior pointers and how it's possible to limit the amount of garbage generated:
http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_14.
(along with the usual techniques, like object pools, used with good success in JavaScript and Android games).
This is incorrect. I've written a bunch of ARM firmware in Go and I've seen server applications that use custom allocators for allocation sensitive code.
"Ultimately, though, it sounds like you want a language which has no garbage collection, and Go is not that language. Language constructs will allocate memory in ways that are not immediately obvious, so there is no reasonable way for a Go program to completely manage its own memory."
Of course you can write memory pools and free lists—you can write them in any language—but, like other languages, the GC will still trace them during mark time and there is no safety provided by the language if you return an object to the pool that's still in use, or leak objects by forgetting to reuse them, and so on.
The fact is that programming in Go, for all practical purposes, requires using a garbage collector.
When you manually allocate memory you are naturally responsible for the lifecycle of that memory. In Go you allocate such memory outside the GC to avoid tracing.
The issue, as Ian pointed out, is that it's hard to pinpoint when GC allocations occur. Language constructs allocate in ways that are not immediately obvious.
Do you write kernels? No? Then shut the fuck up with your GC FUD. Lisp somehow managed to get past that and become the golden child of HN; will it take 50 years and pg's blessing before people stop whining about this in every Go thread?
That is why it fails as a replacement for C like it was originally marketed to be. But fits nicely as a replacement for python. People can start getting concurrency, limited type safety, and reasonable performance without having to really learn anything. The switch from python to go is pretty much trivial.
Do people really want to roll their own Webservers in Go? That's like a lot of work and sounds like disasters waiting to be happening. Sure it has potential, but I'll wait till something mature comes along and then use that. In mean time if you want to get of Ruby, I'd use something proven and fast like Java. There's really nothing wrong with Tomcats.
Having written a few web servers (and other servers) in Go, I assure you that you will be surprised how little work it is. However, I think where Go will shine is in highly customizable "frameworks"—not in the vein of Rails etc. at all but rather collections of components you can piece together for your own needs. You can already see how this will look with the net/http library and its Handlers: just about as easy and clear as hooking in Rack or WSGI middleware/apps, but with the safety and holy-mother-of-job speed that you just don't see in Ruby or Python (okay, the speed isn't that big a deal unless you've only been exposed to Ruby...) and without Java's startup times.
I guess you missed the part of my article about auto-scaling and restarts. The Rails app from my day job takes several seconds to come up, causing queuing and slow performance for our users. There are work arounds (idle instances, warmup requests, rolling restarts), but I personally would rather just have it start fast.
...and not really useful for serious web applications.
As the article points out, there's no real web framework for go, so the majority of things (web apps that is) written in it are toys (see http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-code).
Most pointedly, there's no compelling structured database story, just a mess. The no-sql solutions like mgo are as good as it gets really. ActiveRecord / SqlAlchemy / NHibernate runs rings around anything that currently exists, and without it, your traditional web apps are pretty difficult to build. You'll find a lot of commentary along those lines from people who've tried.
(...but it turns out a lot of people want tiny little web servers that don't do very much, and serve json. It's great for that~)
> As the article points out, there's no real web framework for go [...]
Not true at all. As I covered in the "Go 1.1 released" thread[1], there is no "de-facto" web framework, but there are a handful of good ones: web.go, beego & Revel, to start. Think Flask, Sinatra & Django, respectively, in terms of complexity/kitchen sink.
You are right that there is no "great" ORM in the vein of SQLAlchemy/ActiveRecord, but that's partly because: a) the language is young, and b) the language attracts people that don't like the generalisations/performance issues associated with ORMs.
> ...your traditional web apps are pretty difficult to build.
What's a "traditional web app"? A CRUD app in an MVC style? Sure, you won't be able to turn something "big" around in a short amount of time like you can with Django/Rails, but difficult on the opposite end of the spectrum. You can certainly turn around something performant and scalable, and it's unlikely that you will have to strip components out to keep things fast.
You can, however, bolt together a handful of packages (again, see [1]) and go down the Flask-style route, which seems to be becoming more and more popular these days as people eschew the growing complexity of the bigger frameworks.
It's roughly the same situation as node thought right? Simple HTTP server class as a first class citizen that makes the application self contained, but if you want more advanced functionality you can throw a proxy (NGINX, say) in front.
Would it be so bad to write your Go app using FastCGI? Let a real web server be the server, and build the app in a fast loading binary that can be restarted from time to time. Force session data externalization from the beginning, and have multiple instances that you can restart from time to time.
I know you can cluster Java servlet containers, but those apps tend to too often be initially architected as the "one true immortal process", stuffed full of long lived session data.
I'd rather compare Rust to Erlang, than Go. At least conceptually. However the fact that languages are young shouldn't stop people from writing servers in them.
Does anyone have experience with Go as REST application server? I'm in prototyping phase (in Python) of something that is basically going to be a big REST API frontend with a lot of application logic and a db backend. I'm worried about scale as if this thing is going to take off it needs to scale big and support tens of thousands (or more) of requests a second. From the article it sounds like Go would be a great choice, I found the "gorest" framework and it looks decent, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience in this area? Specifically the DB interfacing, JSON marshalling, and writing lots of classes with complex application logic parts.
It's a tiny rest api for generating promo codes to bypass in app purchase locks in an ios app. It uses gorilla/mux[1] for routing, mongodb with mgo[2], and is heroku-ready[3]. One file and 129 lines all told.
"I'm worried about scale as if this thing is going to take off it needs to scale big..."
Please don't say this.
If you are being paid by someone else, please check with them to ensure what their priorities are when things "scale big" bc often times you can bide yourself time if you have their requirements met while you scramble to make everything perfect on the backend.
If you are not being paid by someone else or this is a side project, then please do not try and solve this question now. Answers to questions of "scale" are so broad that you will drive yourself mad trying to find the "perfect" tool, when one doesn't exist. You don't scale a language or a framework, you scale application logic. Scaling to millions of requests is the best possible problem to have, but put yourself in a position to have that problem!
And asking basic questions of how to build something that can handle some amount of load in a language that you are not familiar with will FAR outweigh the perceived benefits of choosing that language/framework!
Building an API in Go feels -very- robust because of the strong typing and the strict compiler. After a while you'll discover the strength of interfaces and be pleasantly surprised. Combined with the performance boost, I can't think of a better language to write an API in.
FYI, you should replace DocsHandler with net/http's FileServer.
Reasons:
1) the implementation is not vulnerable to path traversal attacks (i.e. if url.Path == "/../../../../../etc/passwd").
2) It automatically handles index.html
3) It uses "/etc/mime.types" and other system files to automatically set mime types
4) It streams the file back instead of reading it all into memory.
> Does anyone have experience with Go as REST application server?
I'm developing my new startup (http://www.TurboHDR.com) in Go on App Engine and it's a very nice development environment.
As part of the process I recently developed a WebDAV package (which I'll open source soon) and it was quite straightforward thanks to Go's great XML package (http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/xml/) which automatically unmarshals XML into regular (possibly annotated) Go structures. The JSON package (http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/) can do the same. It's the most painless experience dealing with XML I've ever had.
Shameless plug: I wrote a package that exposes a CRUD JSON API on top of a backend interface ("Storage") which you implement yourself; so if your API fits the CRUD principle it could be worth to look at:
Try OpenResty - nginx + ngx_postgres/ngx_drizzle/ngx_hiredis/etc. for DB interfacing + ngx_rds_json for JSON marshalling + ngx_lua for complex application logic parts
How are you communicating with Go in a SOA? I think Python/Ruby frontends and Go backends would be a good match, if Thrift/ZeroMQ/Redis/HTTP/whatever bridges work well.
I think that sooner or later, it may get enough of what makes Erlang great to be a replacement, but IIRC, it's not quite there yet. All the process monitoring and management stuff...
Because I like to be able to use function pointers, as well as just interfaces :-)
Because sometimes I like just smashing the "leading" values into a structure, rather than having to write a constructor (or worse, NOT writing a constructor and having to set, set, set my "bean" to make it useful)
It's almost as much fun as TurboP^H^H^H^H^H^H ANSI C.
This is certainly not the case for the way that I personally think about C. Perhaps there are two "spirits" of C; two ways that people think about it:
1. C is small, C is simple, C lets you write useful programs with good performance while keeping the language itself simple. For this view of C, I can see Go being a compelling alternative.
2. C is a bare-metal environment for implementing low-level systems code like VMs, garbage collectors, JITs, and other runtimes. It imposes nothing and never gets in your way. For this view of C (which is how I think of it), Go is not an alternative. If you are inclined to disagree, answer for me: why is the Go runtime and GC not itself written in Go?
I think that perhaps the difference between these two views of C leads to some of the disagreement about whether Go is an alternative for C.