I don't think it's fair to say that Go doesn't address a need. I volunteer on the Rust project, and compilation time of the compiler itself is one of the biggest problems at the moment. Take a look at at the turnaround times on our automated testing bots:
That's 24 minutes spent compiling each and every pull request! Granted, this is triply exacerbated by the fact that as a self-hosted compiler we have to compile three times, but I'd kill for sub-minute turnaround times for even a single stage (on a beefy dev machine we're down to maybe four minutes per stage, so 12 minutes total). We're putting a lot of focus on reducing this burden for our next release, but that's still time that could have been spent on features.
As I understand it, Go is intended to address this need for systems at Google's scale, where compilation presents enormous time overhead. I'm not a Go user so I can't comment on how well it achieves this, but one way or the other I think it's a really fascinating thing to optimize a language for.
Rust suffers from having to compile LLVM as build dependency.
This will surely improve when Rust no longer requires it.
Go compile times are sweet, true. But Modula-2 and Pascal dialect compilers were already achieving similar compile speeds in 16 bit compilers a few decades ago.
Young developers get impressed by Go compilation times because they never experienced those systems.
Those compile times don't include building LLVM, which, on the rare occasion that a recompile is necessary, will add about five minutes on a beefy desktop and about an hour on our buildbots.
Sure, Go compiles a lot faster than C++, but unlike Rust, Go doesn't operate at the same level as C++, but at the same level as Java. How much faster does Go compile than Java?
I'm pretty sure the compilation time is less to do with the "level" that it operates. From presentations on the topic, most of the time savings were by making the syntax completely unambiguous. Apparently, in C/C++ and similar, some of the longest parts of the compilation process are lexing/parsing/AST-building, etc
http://huonw.github.io/isrustfastyet/buildbot/
That's 24 minutes spent compiling each and every pull request! Granted, this is triply exacerbated by the fact that as a self-hosted compiler we have to compile three times, but I'd kill for sub-minute turnaround times for even a single stage (on a beefy dev machine we're down to maybe four minutes per stage, so 12 minutes total). We're putting a lot of focus on reducing this burden for our next release, but that's still time that could have been spent on features.
As I understand it, Go is intended to address this need for systems at Google's scale, where compilation presents enormous time overhead. I'm not a Go user so I can't comment on how well it achieves this, but one way or the other I think it's a really fascinating thing to optimize a language for.