Comment by zadikian

Thanks. I'm not surprised they called it a C++ competitor back then. All those systems-style features do make it awkward now that it's targeting the Java-like use cases. No pointer arithmetic, but pointers yeah, and it's not very clear what you're supposed to pass by value vs by ref. You can do things like a DBMS in Go that count as systems programming, but for sure it's not a competitor with C.

Go happened to be attractive for web backends too because it had good greenthreading before Java etc did, and better performance than JS, so it makes sense that they changed the marketing.