Ah, the sweet smell of language wars in the morning.

Seriously, though, I wonder how much of golang adoption is due to it being a shiny new thing relative to Java and how much is due to it actually solving a problem. Bray outlines several areas where golang functionally outperforms Java (deadlocks, truly WORA).

I have used golang a bit and found it ok. Because of my background I'd prefer to write code in a dynamic language but I get that there are times when you need to have better performance, and you may want that without the baggage of the JVM.