Tbh Go is also really nice for various local tools where you don’t want something as complex as C++ but also don’t want to depend on the full C# runtime (or large bundles when self-contained), or the same with Java.

With Wails it’s also a low friction way to build desktop software (using the heretical web tech that people often reach for, even for this use case), though there are a few GUI frameworks as well.

Either way, self contained executables that are easy to make and during development give you a rich standard library and not too hard of a language to use go a long way!

i wonder what makes go more modern than java, in terms of features.

Go has a garbage collector though. This makes it unsuitable for many use cases where you could have used C or C++ in the past. Rust and Zig don't have a GC, so they are able to fill this role.

GC is a showstopper for my day job (hard realtime industrial machine control/robotics), but would also be unwanted for other use cases where worst case latency is important, such as realtime audio/video processing, games (where you don't want stutter, remember Minecraft in Java?), servers where tail latency matters a lot, etc.

Thanks. I write some Go, and feel the same about it. I really enjoy it actually.

Maybe I'll jump to Zig as a side-gig (ha, it rhymes), but I still can't motivate myself to play with Rust. I'm happy with C++ on that regard.

Maybe gccrs will change that, IDK, yet.