> compared to its most direct competitor, Rust.

No, no, no and no. How on Earth people come to this conclusion? Go is closer to node.js than to Rust. Like, it is not even a competition they are so far apart. One is a “zero-cost abstraction, low-level language”, the other is a “managed language with a GC like million others, which is as badly expressive as C”. To mention some positive as well, virtual threads are cool.

But the two is nothing alike and this sentiment is just utterly stupid and I see it everywhere for God knows why.

> How on Earth people come to this conclusion?

1. Because they were first unveiled around the same time, as AOT natively-compiled languages with drastically different takes and directions.

2. Because when the authors of Go first released it, they called it a systems language. By which they meant, unlike anyone else, a language to write systems with. Like… programs.

3. Because when first unveiled, Rust was a very different language, much more similar to Go. It always had a much more functional and type-heavy bent, but it had a runtime and scheduler, userland threads, kinda-sorta a GC in potential (“GC’d pointers” though no GC was ever implemented for real). As noted in (1) it looked a bit on a completely different take on a similar niche. It was brought downstack over time as the community saw its potential as an “innovative” breath of fresh air for low-level uses: higher levels of the stack already had memory-safe and type-heavy programming languages if they wanted those.

It's true... Go was supposed to be great for mission-critical stuff but the issues pop up quickly. I've seen several cases where someone migrates a Go service to Rust and like a bad dream the major problems disappear.

Isn't Go more positioned as a language for web services, rather than systems programming?

And yet Go is much more popular than Rust.

… is it? For example, the Stack Overflow survey says Rust was loved by 86% of its users, while Go by 64%. Rust also beat Go on the percentage of respondents who wanted to use it. (But Golang was used by 2% more respondents than Rust, at 11.15% vs 9.32%.)

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre...

Describing that as "2% more" instead of "20% more" is a bit misleading when comparing just two items.

Sorry, I intended to say "2% more of the respondents". That was what I had in my mind when I wrote it. (In general, my opinion is that Relative Statistics Considered Harmful, they're like absolute statistics but with all the context removed, and I never intend to give them.)

And PHP is more popular than both of them, so it's not tomorrow that gauging the qualities of a language on the use the vulgum pecus makes of it will be a good idea.