You should read this http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article which addresses points 1 and 2. As for 3 and 4, Go

You should read this http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article which addresses points 1 and 2. As for 3 and 4, Go _is_ fast compared to a lot of languages, and has just gotten a lot faster. I think we're pretty realistic about the GC, in that we say it's simple and it works, and for most people it is more than adequate. We continue to spend a lot of time working on the GC. One thing we do say, however, is that unlike Java, Go gives you more control over memory use so that you don't need to put so much pressure on the garbage collector. 5 - there's a bunch of Go usage at Google that we can't talk about. It is being used increasingly all over the place, but growth is pretty organic at this point. The public things we can talk about, we do. The Google Downloads thing is not a small component, by the way, but rather the entire download server. We hope to release part of that as an open source project soon, so you can get an idea as to what it actually does. One of the more impressive things about that particular service is that it serves massive traffic with Go's built in net/http package.