Same here. Package management was non existent at the time, not sure how it is now.

There are pointers without pointer arithmetic, I really don't know why they are there. If you already know programming you will be fine with go, but if it's the first language someone learns I think they'll go catatonic when they are exposed to real pointers, dealing with shared memory, package management, generics, etc. because its going to be hard unlearning ways used in go.

On the plus side go is small and very performanent.