Some of those things are a direct result of Go's simplicity. Good tooling in particular is available because Go syntax is deliberately simple. It's simple for

Some of those things are a direct result of Go's simplicity. Good tooling in particular is available because Go syntax is deliberately simple. It's simple for humans and simple for tools. Go shipped with Go parser in standard library from day 1. Go syntax hasn't changed from that day. Having Go parser in standard library means that building tools like go get, linters, auto-formatters, code coverage tools etc. is very simple. Contrast that with C++ or Rust or Swift. A C++ parser alone (clang) is probably a bigger project than the whole Go compiler. Rust and Swift don't even have a stable syntax yet and as far as I know they don't have the equivalent of Go's ast package. If Go didn't aggressively tame complexity then it would have ended the same way as Rust or Swift. Sure, it would have generics, but also slow compilation time, language that takes years to reach stability, tooling that is exponentially more difficult to write etc. That's engineering: making decision about what is more important and accepting that less important things have to be dropped. If features are most important, then you accept complexity. See Rust or Swift. If simplicity is most important, then you accept less features. See Go. I for one am glad that I have a choice. I would rather have Go than a third language driven by the same ideas and priorities as Rust or Swift.