It is a need you are not aware of. Maybe you can do everything in vim-go that you can do in IDEs but many people, including me, don’t want to learn vim and feel/are more productive in IDEs, especially as the code size grows. JetBrains only decided to offer the Go IDE after they saw the Go plug-in (that works in their other IDEs) take off. The demand is there.

Even knowing vim well (or rather emacs more so) I still prefer an IDE. The improvements to workflow are just something that I can't get out of emacs/vim, and for big projects those improvements are a necessity IMO.

That makes sense. Have you tried something like Visual Studio Code? To me that seems to be the half-way point between something like vim and a full blown IDE

I've switched from ruby-vim-linux back to java-ide-windows 2 years ago, while of course being a `downgrade` in a certain sense, having Intellij was A BLESSING, the VIM mode is very good and although of course I had to change some stuff in my workflow, I was surprised by how good and smooth the tool is and that I didn't feel "held back". I would consider using Intellij IDEs for other languages even if they're not "IDE oriented", there's no comparison between it and any other IDE I've used before(I make sure to point out to colleagues on Eclipse that they're cavemen to me and that my tool is like the sharpest fancy-Cook-knife and theirs is an old-blind-bread-knife and it's a piece of trash). Seriously, I consider it one of the best pieces of software I've seen and I plan on studying it's program design and code someday.

Answering your question, well, that's what they do, they have a lot skin in the `editor` and `developer tool` game and also a lot of stuff to build on top, so it's not a surprise they want to 'serve' a lot of languages. I don't know about Go specifically but I'd guess even if not 'filling a need' I'd think possible that they are capable of discovering ways of smoothing out the experience or something, which is valuable.

I felt the same way about IDEs in general, until I started using more features of CIDER (and Paredit) within Emacs for Clojure development. So many CIDER features I didn't expect to find helpful, turned out to be invaluable, and I later discovered that they're pretty much basic features of more full-featured IDEs like Jetbrains makes. So that really sold me on IDEs in general. That said, we're still using Clojure, and CIDER (plus Paredit) is still the best IDE (and path of least friction) for it, so I'm still using that.

I used vim for golang development for the past few years, however I recently switched jobs to a company with a large golang codebase and I struggled to navigate it efficiently with vim so yesterday I setup IntelliJ (with the vim plugin). It instantly made it easier for me to grasp the codebase. This might indicate that I had some gaps in my knowledge with vim, but either way I'm more productive now.

You can map keys in vim to jump to definition, view the underlying type, see implementera of a function. It's still nicer to me to be able to use a more visual IDE, but those things help. I think code completion like in Visual Studio Code makes things a lot nicer. I'm glad there is competition out there.

I use IntelliJ with Go plug-ins and it offers really nice autocomplete for functions/types/etc. — Super nice!

Agreed. That plugin has been a big help for me, I'm really excited to see what official Go support from JetBrains is going to look like!

I also use vim. Sometimes it's nice to use a step through debugger instead of print statements.

Debuggers are nice to have; https://atom.io/packages/go-debug is a good plugin that uses the delve debugger to step through code. No Java required.

It integrates into Visual Studio Code as well.

Is there no command-line debugger for go?

the delve debugger is a command line debugger.

I think gdb is an option.

No, not it's not. It has never been.

Ah, caveats within: https://golang.org/doc/gdb

I fully agree with you. This new product seems to be bringing in Java paradigm to Go. In Java it is natural to have tons of scaffolding generated with IDEs which I think is unnecessary in Go.

But as you say maybe there is a demand for such product specially for people coming from Java background.

In what way does having a decent IDE "bring a Java paradigm to go"?