This is simply not true. Go is nowhere near that even when only new Greenfield projects are considered. I see many of the start-ups using it but most new projects are still in Java or c#. But go has captured the Dev ops tools area quite a bit.

Are you saying that Go is significantly more popular than Java for backend, server-side development? I'd like to see a citation on that, because pretty much any statistic I've read has said otherwise. If you are saying it's significantly more performant, then I'd like to see evidence for that too.

Go is simple, easy to install, and the benifits of a compiled language are huge. I can apply all of my systems knowledge to understand how my app is performing. The JVM is a career in of itself, and locks you into an ecosystem that is very proprietary and frankly full of lame enterprise salesmen and big business fogies. Go is fun. It’s branding is fun, it’s community is passionate, and a lot of big names are on the tin that speaks to a lot of us who love and grew up on Unix.

I mean, do you want to support Oracle and Larry’s bid to buy more islands or ken and rob?

You're not really arguing in good faith. This reads more like a parody.

… and so is just saying stuff :-)

C# was a windows-only show until very recently with the introduction of.NET Core, and ASP.NET Core is gaining in popularity very fast.

IMHO Go's current adoption rate has more to do with politics and Google's aura than anything else, really.

And I really don't see your assertion on Go eating Java's lunch. Sometimes Java appears to be the only game in town wrt backend development, with Python appearing in second place.

> try to deploy a Java or C# program as an Ubuntu service on a low-end 512 MB Digital Ocean host

I have no idea how a generi C# or Java program fares with so little resources, but I've deployed ASP.NET Core and Spring apps on Hetzner's smallest VMs (2GB) without any problem. I had to google digital ocean's micro VMs to check if such a thing really existed, and I have to say that the price difference (Hetzner's 2GB VM for 3€/month Vs Digital Ocean's 512MB VM for $2.50/month) hardly justifies the trouble.

So unless you're compelled to save about $0.50/month on hosting, I hardly see the point of your example.

Apparently there is a new Java project [1] floating around that is promising a way to use Java exactly in this use case, but I haven't played around with it.

[1]: https://quarkus.io/

You can run an empty Spring Boot service in 15MB of RAM or so.

Others have already pointed out doing this with .NET, and yes, it's also possible in Java land. I have done this, even running a Spring Boot service which is generally considered more heavy weight than other frameworks like Dropwizard. A plain Spring Boot service runs in about 15-20MB RAM if I recall. And now with the GC improvements in Java 11+, it's even better.

http://august.nagro.us/small-java.html

> Now Java is showing it’s age and cross compiling is no longer the problem it once was.

I see numerous flaws in this sentence. How Java is showing it's age, language wise, comparing to eg. Go? It is fully OO, has generics and recent versions with advanced functional stuff are making Java pretty modern language on (almost) Scala level.

Regarding cross compiling, it is still the problem. If Go gives you 3-4 platforms out of the box, you can't say cross compiling is solved problem; try to work with MIPS or slightly less popular embedded platforms.

Honestly, the only ads I see for Go developers are for blockchain projects, which suggest buzzword-driven development.

What we do know is that Kubernetes, Docker, Terrafofm, Prometheus, Caddy, et al. have taken off in part because Go is easily accesible and can scale. Go has risen metorically to the top just like Java did, and there are lots of really huge deployments of Go out there. The JVM will always have certain limitations and require it’s users to specialize in JVM tuning and architecture. Many users are also hesitant to support a company like Oracle, and the enterprise shilling that comes with the Java ecosystem.

And in fact performance itself is a very objective criteria. Either a piece of software is fast enough or it isn't. This doesn't refer only to percieved performance, but also hard performance indicators established in the requirements of a project. Sw dev 101 really.

Furthermore, languages and their implementations can be assigned to different performance personalities, from very fast (e.g C) to slow (e.g. Ruby). Go doesn't belong in the very fast bucket, it's one level below, hanging out with Java, C# and others.

The arguments regarding Oracle are frankly worthless, but if you want to go there, at least Oracle admit they're evil and restrict their evilness to price gouging on their products. They don't pretend to be some force of good while surveilling billions of people through devices, apps and web platforms like Google does.

It might be trendy or fashionable to poopoo on Java, but that criticism isn't driven by technical arguments.

I just feel like I've been lied to in University. Java was presented as the silver bullet in University. "It runs anywhere and models the real world". "In Java, you can't compare apples and oranges!". Turns out you can, if someone implements an AppleOrangeComparator. Great.

I'm just venting at this point, don't mind me.