Speed of compilation, not necessarily speed of compiled code. Missing generics: deadly. Passing around just interfaces? At times clearly not sufficient. Their idea of closures? Looks messy to me. Having a special syntax just for threading stuff? Totally beyond lame!

Golang is absolutely not a replacement for c or c++. It's a better replacement for the other languages out there requiring a VM to run anything. In short golang is better at cross platform than these other platforms and is IMHO good for writing good tooling. One of my colleagues said that golang now is sort of like java was in the old, old days. Making the same mistakes and needing necessary features added to become truly productive.

In my opinion ternary stuff is short handed eye candy and not a great reason to discount a language.

c++'s collections and <algorithm> fundamentally and utterly thrash anything golang claims to have, not to mention the whole stupidity around building garbage collection into a language that wants to be low level.