I also personally find Go syntax to be horrible, especially now with generics.
I personally consider better use Go than C for such purposes, even if they aren't "systems programming".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227986
This perpetual debate reminds me of the trouble HN used to have with the concepts of "contractors" and "consultants", where any time someone mentioned that they were doing consulting work there'd be an argument about whether it was in fact contracting. It's a message board tic, is what I'm saying, not a real semantic concern.
Pike: When we first announced Go we called it a systems programming language, and I slightly regret that because a lot of people assumed that meant it was an operating systems writing language. And what we should have called it was a 'server writing language', which is what we really thought of it as. As I said in the talk before and the questions, it's turned out to be more generally useful than that. But know what I understand is that what we have is a cloud infrastructure language because what we used to call servers are now called cloud infrastructure. And so another definition of systems programming is stuff that runs in the cloud.
Alexandrescu: I'm really glad I let Rob speak right now because my first question was 'go introduces itself as a systems programming language' and then that disappeared from the website. What's the deal with that? So he was way ahead of me by preempting that possible question.
So it seems to me that they struggle with the nuances of the concept as much as the commenters here, particularly as it pertains to Golang.
Despite my opinion on Go's design, I rather would like to see people using Go instead of C for such use cases.
Although I guess JIT compilers may be classified as systems programming, since you need to do some OS-specific tricks with virtual memory during execution of the compiler.
Languages that are not systems language trade-off this capability for other benefits like concise expressiveness and ease of use.
Of course, the garbage collector did not exactly make it easier - but it's an interesting piece of software.
but it's an interesting piece of software.
Agreed. And I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible to use Go that way, but I think it's fair to say that it's less common and perhaps even less desirable to do that.
OTOH, people have written (at least parts of) Operating Systems in Java[1] even, so never say never...
You can write a database with it but that makes it an application language, not system.
Otherwise you could call every language a "system language" and the distinction would lose all meaning.
https://golangdocs.com/system-programming-in-go-1
EDIT: formatting