I think go would have gotten a lot more love from C and C++ users if they weren't so resistant to having an optimizing compiler. I'm not referring to removing bounds checks - I'm referring to things like stack-passed function arguments and the normal optimization passes that you get from -O2 in gcc. Sometimes you want a slow compiler that does a lot of heavy lifting.

Now, Rust is the new hotness and it doesn't make a lot of sense to use other things if you care about both safety and speed.