Go is possibly easier to get into production than something based on a hefty VM, because it compiles down into one relatively small executable (except for any dynamically linked libraries being used through cgo). If you've compiled a binary executable for the target platform all you have to do is put the executable on the production machine and run. No additional runtimes, no extra libraries or vm extensions. Everything you need is right there in that executable.

I find this to be a big advantage for using Go over something like Python or Java. You still need any dynamically linked DLLs, but all the Go code itself and the runtime is statically compiled and linked into the executable produced by gc.

As for the concerns about it not being used in production, there's Heroku: http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html

All this is completely ignoring the fact that the language itself has a really nice syntax, and some excellent concurrency support. Nothing it does is particularly new, but I think Go is greater than the sum of its parts.

Heroku use it for their Doozer datastore which manages their distributed grid thingy.

Info here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/print.html

http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html

http://xph.us/2011/04/13/introducing-doozer.html

And of course google use it internally.

>does anyone on HN have a good story about using Go in production?

http://tinkercad.com http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/tinkercad-raises-1-million/ (HN user kaib can say more)

Krasin is right, most of the stuff on tinkercad.com is written in Go. There are a few inner loops that use C++ to get better SSE optimizations.

I work at Iron.io[1]. Our new SimpleWorker API[2] is written in Go and we'll soon be releasing another service implemented with Go.

[1] http://iron.io/

[2] http://blog.simpleworker.com/2011/11/simpleworker-has-shiny-...

There are a surprising number of organizations using Go in production for such an extremely young and fast evolving language, and they all seem quite happy with it, including Canonical, Heroku, the Open Knowledge Foundation and others

For an unofficial and incomplete list see: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

I like go because it has good concurrency and doesn't use a boatload of RAM like the JVM.

Go's major advantage is its cute mascot.

At Google, Go seems to be competing with Python. http://www.quora.com/Which-is-easier-to-program-in-Python-or...

Looks like for certain problems that don't need to interoperate with the larger system and don't need big library support, Go can sneak in.