OP was saying porting a project to Go sounds like premature optimization. The alternative is obviously to continue to use the original language.

The question to be answered is why are you porting it? Fun and giggles? Hoping to achieve better performance? Scale? Portability? Correctness? Simplicity? Support?

I'd say most of the time its for fun and giggles. Which I think is as fine a reason as all the others, but when its costing someone's elses money, maybe you should be more considerate.

I think it's the opposite. Choosing python in the first place is mostly for fun and giggles.

People want to switch away from python because of all the pain they feel from it.

Ya, maybe for some. I think for businesses part of it is familiarity, as its now a lot of people's first language. I also think its a choice made often when you start, because it allows you to go faster in the beginning. Which is where a lot of new projects need to be the fastest. Its still a great choice for projects that are short lived, that's why ML works so well on it, most of ML is just quick iterations on prototypes until you find a solid model.

Depends. If we're talking about high performance, yet expressive language without a steep learning curve, I say Swift. The only major drawback right now is lack of pure Swift AWS SDK. And unfortunately, AWS team has no plans to write one, yet.

I think any of the JVM languages like Java, Kotlin, Clojure, Scala, Eta, etc.

The JVM as far as I know is still the runtime king, faster then Go.

For a website? PHP or Ruby. If you feel you have low level needs move to rust. If you want microservices use node. Go is a compromise of everything.

Those languages that you mentioned compromise on much more than go.

That is.. backwards in almost every way.

The most general answer is OCaml, though in practice I'd probably use something else depending on the details. For most cases there's a better pick than OCaml, but I don't think OCaml is ever a worse choice than Go.