But the D standard library also relies largely on a garbage collector, so it's questionable that it differs much from Go in that respect. As most things, it's

But the D standard library also relies largely on a garbage collector, so it's questionable that it differs much from Go in that respect. As most things, it's a spectrum and not binary. Userland is also part of an operating system and could be written in Go without much trouble. One could also argue that things like Docker are also systems programming. Go is less 'systems programming' than C, C++, or Rust, because it has a garbage collector. Go is more 'systems programming' than Java, C#, node.js or Ruby, because it compiles to native binaries, provides value types (C# does too), integrates more tightly in standard UNIX APIs, etc.