8 reasons developers love Go—and 8 reasons they don’t

Why some hate it: How many copies of the Go libraries are on my disk? If I have 100 programs, that means 100 copies. At some point, efficiency is a consideration. Yes, disk space is cheaper than ever, but memory bandwidth and caching continue to be primary issues for execution speed.

Big daddy Google

Golang was developed at Google and the big company continues to be one of its major supporters, shipping the compiler and much of the toolchain. There is some support from outside Google like GopherJS, a transpiler that turns Go into JavaScript. But for the most part, much of the Go development effort comes directly from inside Google.

Why some love it: A great deal of the work today involves writing code for the constellations of servers and clients, the same kind that is such a big part of Google’s workload. If Go is good for Google, it’s also good for those of us who are working in the same way. If Google engineers built something they would love, anyone with similar projects is going to love it just as much.