Lack of generics kept most of us away.

You don't return to 1992 C++, thinking nah this is fine.

Companies like F-Secure are using Go for real system programming just fine.

https://www.f-secure.com/en/consulting/foundry/usb-armory

Under wider definition of “system software” you can consider db tech (etcd, cockroachdb, digraph) and compute management software (kubernetes, nomad, docker) to be included into that. Which is where Go is doing just fine. Lower level stuff is harder but because of gc not lack of generics

GC is just fine for OS development, as proven by Xerox PARC, ETHZ systems used in production.

The problem is more of mentality and not having management willing to push it down unbelievers no matter what, that prefers to recycle UNIX clones instead to save money.

Midori powered Asian Bing for a while and even then the Windows team did not believe it was possible.

It def convinced me. I wrote c++ for almost 10 year before switching to Go. Even after c++11 have come out it was still night and day. Anecdotally the team i left at google rewrote some of my stuff from c++ in Go that I didn’t get to at the time

Same experience here. 10 years ago, I wrote a lot of C++, today I write almost exclusively Go.

"The Go team originally wanted to replace C++, especially inside Google"

Im glad you said that and I was not just imagining that myself. I remember following the Go language closely in its earlier days and it was often spoken about as a "systems language" but it actually seems to have ended up settling as a language to write servers for people who are sick of OOP but still like their imperative C style code.

In my opinion they should have pushed for D instead of Go. It’s leagues better as a systems language if you can tolerate GC or if you can’t you just don’t use the GC.