Yes, there have been many other languages with ahead-of-time compilation and garbage-collected runtimes, but Go is one of the few that might be considered popul

Yes, there have been many other languages with ahead-of-time compilation and garbage-collected runtimes, but Go is one of the few that might be considered popular today. At this point, one might invoke the old chestnut, "If you make technology choices based on popularity, you might as well go with (Windows|PHP)." But there are degrees of popularity, and there are advantages in choosing something that's at least moderately popular, e.g. a large selection of ready-to-use libraries and a pool of developers who don't need to learn a new language on the job.