So first, what exactly I was meant to say, is that: Go design resembles closest to Google's internal C++ APIs.

Then, when I saw people praises Go APIs, I feel that some people worked on C++ APIs at Google, were missing some credits. That's a derived feeling from the above.

That is not to say that this File design was already being praised (not to say that it does not deserve praise); or that it should be criticized (not to say that it does not have problems).

As for your example to contradict my claim: "Stat returns FileInfo, many of the fields of which might be meaningless in a cloud filesystem": 1. This has to be there because a File API has to be compatible with OS files (Unixy). And Google's API also does the same thing. 2. Incompatibility derives from enforcing information that not present in another scenario. Clearly, the presence of such attributes does not prevent them to be applied on cloud files systems.

And further, Cloud file systems do have mode, and directory...