Frankly I don't know if Go passes any barometer for "important". I don't think it's significantly disrupting any particular space, so if that's the measure of a language's importance, I don't think Go's quite meeting that. I find it unlikely it ever will.

I don't think it was ever intended to be important in those terms, however. It was designed primarily to solve specific sets of problems at Google, but I don't think any sights were set on the C, Java or other related language worlds at large. From that perspective, I would argue that Go's actually been fairly successful.

I'd argue the Rust team is much more eager to be a real disrupter. I think in that sense, they're succeeding in ways and have not yet achieved success in others.

> Given all that has Go really done all that well?

My intuition is that the only languages that have grown faster are those that were blessed as "native" for a popular platform. For it's age it seems to be doing really really well.

But given Go's mix of advantages and disadvantages, should we expect it to be doing better? I doubt it.

Still to be seen if it becomes a Ruby or a Java, though.

Actually, as far as I know, Microsoft is using Go in a few places in Azure.