Here's my take on this as someone who loves both Go and PHP (yeah, I know!). I agree that startups can get entrenched in their legacy code, but I also think the

Here's my take on this as someone who loves both Go and PHP (yeah, I know!). I agree that startups can get entrenched in their legacy code, but I also think there is a false choice here: 1. Write with a system language from the start. Yikes! 2. Do a total rewrite of your application later when you hit scale issues. Yikes! In my opinion, though, Go is not well-suited (today) for rapid prototyping or web application development, even with some of the frameworks. This shouldn't be a surprise. Go is a systems language. I think languages like PHP, Ruby, and the lot are much better suited early stage startups. When you hit problems of scale, it's very straight-forward to isolate parts of your application that do not scale well and translate those components to Go. Introducing Go for only the components that require high availability and guarantee a level of performance / memory safety as an iteration to your original application code is probably a much saner choice.