My experience says "don't use Go for building web applications".
Compared to something like Ruby on Rails, the development story with Go is much less batteries-included. You'll find yourself gluing together lots of components, and they're not really that friendly. Plus, for any front-end code, you'll end up using Node or whatever anyway to build assets. It's big and messy and not a good match.
Go does excel at two kind of web applications however:
- Simple single-page applications that use Websockets or simple AJAX to perform a basic task. In this case, the limitations around templating and such are less obvious, and Go is a brilliant match for Websocket clients. Think of things like status dashboards.
- JSON APIs with no front-end. Build your front-end using whatever other technology, and just fire requests at a Go app. It's pretty good at handling this, though JSON marshalling/unmarshalling is a bit stupid in Go.
People use Go to write "infrastructure services", such as Rest APIs, caches, proxies,queues ... and command line tools. That's what Go does best since it requires minimal investment upfront( the language is tiny, the standard library has a lot of network oriented code...).
Whether one can effectively write a classic website with complicated HTML templates and web forms like Rails,JSF and co allow is however questionable since Go type system lacks of expressiveness. Go fans answer is "use client side javascript" which is ironic since javascript is the antithesis of Go in terms of design.
Go is great for what is describe as "plumbing" - things like proxies, infrastructure tools or simple microservices. The simplicity is a great benefit in these cases.
I've also found it unexpectedly useful for some embedded applications. Deployin code to the raspberry pi is super simple and that makes it quite attractive - there are projects that provide for thing like i2c, GPIO and SPI, and combined with the built-in HTTP support its a pretty compelling platform.
> Go is great for what is describe as "plumbing" - things like proxies, infrastructure tools or simple microservices. The simplicity is a great benefit in these cases.
Those reasons aren't really convincing to add another platform into the stack for me. I'd just continue using the many good-enough technologies to build those things on.
I was getting into Go some years ago and came to the same conclusion as you stated. It's good of course if its someone's favorite language to use, then it doesn't matter what it is and isn't great at. But in the end for me it didn't do enough, or do enough better than existing broad PLs that I already knew.
I think Go is still in need of a "killer usecase" to justify its usage for people like me. Rails was that for Ruby. Linux entrenchment and Django was that for Python (now numerics and scientific computing). Node for JS. That said, I'm a Go fan in theory as a "simple is better" type.
Compared to something like Ruby on Rails, the development story with Go is much less batteries-included. You'll find yourself gluing together lots of components, and they're not really that friendly. Plus, for any front-end code, you'll end up using Node or whatever anyway to build assets. It's big and messy and not a good match.
Go does excel at two kind of web applications however:
- Simple single-page applications that use Websockets or simple AJAX to perform a basic task. In this case, the limitations around templating and such are less obvious, and Go is a brilliant match for Websocket clients. Think of things like status dashboards.
- JSON APIs with no front-end. Build your front-end using whatever other technology, and just fire requests at a Go app. It's pretty good at handling this, though JSON marshalling/unmarshalling is a bit stupid in Go.