The error handing is terrible and it's well known it's a problem. It's a really bad situation. It's not to say you can't do anything with the language, just that you need to really understand the tools and strategies that mitigate the deficiencies and be prepared from day 1 to exercise them, or your project is in for growing pains.

What's more, I do not think the community has "solved" for those strategies. I know google internally has one set of guidelines, but other teams and orgs do other stuff.

Quite frankly, there are many aspects of its design that ended up being sub-optimal for large codebases. Look at the profound about-face the language took on bundling as an example.

We can bandy about all we want about this, but uh... certainly as a longtime user of Kubernetes I can say, "They have found ways to deal with the language's error handling."

The lack of a good debugger is something that sort of scares me personally. From what I've read it seems like you can sort of use GDB, and there's some experimental tools, which doesn't sound nearly as good as what you can get out of something even as new as Swift.

I dislike Go intensely, but nothing else currently fits its niche as well.

For a large or complex codebase, I nominate Cloud Foundry. About 1.5M SLOC of Go (1.8M LOC) in the main cloudfoundry repos[0]. Almost all new development is in Go.

There's still about 370KSLOC (470K LOC) of Ruby. Eventually most of it will be replaced, which will drive that Go codebase up a lot.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. Lots of my colleagues wrote most of that Go. I for one pity them, but they seem to have enjoyed it.

[0] https://www.openhub.net/p/cloudfoundry

What do you dislike about Go?