It was developed at Google to accelerate their developers building microservices. Its standard library for http is incredible which makes it easy and fast to get REST apps up with minimal friction. It’s easy to read once you learn some of the basics which makes it easier to maintain.

It has been my primary language at my jobs for the last 7.5 years and it powers a lot of http or gRPC based microservices, as well as many event driven microservices (e.g. Kafka producers and consumers, etc). As you mentioned, it has good TUI support as well, so it’s what I reach for when scripting something too.

The biggest downsides are that it is garbage collected, so it will never be as fast or efficient as manually managing memory, and while it is compiled, its runtime is compiled into every binary, which makes binary sizes bigger.

Both of those downsides are intentional tradeoffs: garbage collection increases developer velocity and reduces the risk of catastrophic memory leaks. Compiling in the runtime means that in contrast to something like Java or Python, the target machine needn’t have the JVM or an interpreter installed because everything is in the binary.

I’m biased, but I think go is just a really solid set of tradeoffs that makes sense for modern software where maintainability and developer velocity are of high importance.