Comment by omcnoe

Golang does have a lot of weird flaws/gotchas, but as a language target for a compiler (transpiler) it's actually pretty great!

Syntax is simple and small without too many weird/confusing features, it's cross platform, has a great runtime and GC out of the box, "errors as values" so you can build whatever kind of error mechanism you want on top, green threading, speedy AOT compiler. Footguns that apply when writing Go don't apply so much when just using it as a compile target.

I've been writing a tiny toy functional language targeting Go and it's been really fun.

Go's defer is generally good, but it interacts weirdly with error handling (huge wart on Go language design) and has weird scoping rules (function scoped instead of scope scoped).