Because Go is my go-to language these days (no pun intended). I really enjoy writing in it, you can produce quality software, and - critically for this project

Because Go is my go-to language these days (no pun intended). I really enjoy writing in it, you can produce quality software, and - critically for this project - a high-quality implementation of the distributed consensus protocol at the center of rqlite was available in Go. With Go I feel like I can get stuff done quicker than C, and still produce high-quality, performant, programs.