As a language maybe but for usage, not so much. For me, most modern uses of C fall into 3 camps: + extreme portability + complete, low level resource control

As a language maybe but for usage, not so much. For me, most modern uses of C fall into 3 camps: + extreme portability + complete, low level resource control + foundational libraries And Go doesn't really qualify for any of these. For the latter 2 largely because of the GC. I think in practice, that its engineering bent i.e. no frills language and high quality tooling, will more likely see it being used in the server-side application/middleware space. I guess not surprisingly. So it really is up against Java, Python, Ruby and C++ and is, therefore, interesting in that it isn't trying to compete on lingustic goodies.