My background is in garbage-collected languages, including .NET and PHP. Because of my lack of background in manual memory management, I've always been nervous

My background is in garbage-collected languages, including .NET and PHP. Because of my lack of background in manual memory management, I've always been nervous to try to learn C, even when it may be a better approach. Go sounds like a great language for someone with my background to be able to work with a closer to the metal language but by handling some of the more difficult aspects of working with C like memory management and pointer arithmetic.