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Sure, "systems programming" has a variety of meanings. But, there are a lot of areas where C was the obvious choice in the past but Go might be a suitable repla

Sure, "systems programming" has a variety of meanings. But, there are a lot of areas where C was the obvious choice in the past but Go might be a suitable replacement today. Areas where concurrency and safety is maybe more important than raw performance: Databases (and there are many now written in Go, including alternative types of databases like time series, key/value, etc.), servers, etc. I tend to consider those systems level, even if they are not kernel level or running on bare metal. Obviously, if one defines "systems programming" more strictly than that, and only mean code that directly interacts with hardware or has hard realtime requirements (which also probably means it must interact directly with hardware), then Go does not make sense in that category. But, C has given up a lot of territory over the past several decades. When I first started programming, C was the language you used for writing almost any real application...if you weren't using assembly. That has changed a lot in the intervening years, and almost no one would think to use C for GUI apps today, for example.

solidsnack9000 10y ago
Databases have been written in Java, too; but the combination of performance unpredictability (not something Go has addressed, since it is also garbage-collected) and a bad C compatibility story has proven to limit the reach of these projects.
- throwbsidbdk 10y ago
  True. Even very successful database projects in Java have some issues with GC pauses. Go seems to be, IMO, taking the things Java is best at and trying to make something better. Basically, how would you build Java today if you could do it again?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > Basically, how would you build Java today if you could do it again? Take Modula-3 (1986), change the keywords to lowercase and re-brand it as "Cool Language X". Still better Go than C.
- dlanouette 10y ago
  > Databases have been written in Java, too; Your comment seems to imply that java hasn't been successful for db development. HBase, Cassandra and ElasticSearch would all disagree. Yes, there are situations where GC is not appropriate. But I think those situations aren't as common as they are made out to be.
  - solidsnack9000 10y ago
    Well, I'm thinking of RDBMSes, of which there are some written in Java -- but I think you would agree, they have never gained much traction relative to Postgres and MySQL (or Oracle in enterprise). HBase and ElasticSearch, and even Cassandra can be seen as somewhat niche today. This doesn't mean they aren't doing something of value; and it doesn't mean using the same platform for OLTP and OLAP is the way of the future; but it does mean the competition in their space is more limited and less indicative. There are ground-up rewrites of Cassandra in non-GC'd languages out there, for what it's worth.

solidsnack9000 10y ago

Databases have been written in Java, too; but the combination of performance unpredictability (not something Go has addressed, since it is also garbage-collected) and a bad C compatibility story has proven to limit the reach of these projects.

throwbsidbdk 10y ago
True. Even very successful database projects in Java have some issues with GC pauses. Go seems to be, IMO, taking the things Java is best at and trying to make something better. Basically, how would you build Java today if you could do it again?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Basically, how would you build Java today if you could do it again? Take Modula-3 (1986), change the keywords to lowercase and re-brand it as "Cool Language X". Still better Go than C.
dlanouette 10y ago
> Databases have been written in Java, too; Your comment seems to imply that java hasn't been successful for db development. HBase, Cassandra and ElasticSearch would all disagree. Yes, there are situations where GC is not appropriate. But I think those situations aren't as common as they are made out to be.
- solidsnack9000 10y ago
  Well, I'm thinking of RDBMSes, of which there are some written in Java -- but I think you would agree, they have never gained much traction relative to Postgres and MySQL (or Oracle in enterprise). HBase and ElasticSearch, and even Cassandra can be seen as somewhat niche today. This doesn't mean they aren't doing something of value; and it doesn't mean using the same platform for OLTP and OLAP is the way of the future; but it does mean the competition in their space is more limited and less indicative. There are ground-up rewrites of Cassandra in non-GC'd languages out there, for what it's worth.