Zig can (in a lot of situations) presumably easily fill Go's role. Both languages have a focus on simplicity and explicit syntax.
In other words, Zig is in fact a decent alternative to Go. Go just isn't a good alternative to Zig.
Yes, but it was before the invention of mobile phone… Since Java came out, the majority of back-end has been written in memory-safe language, for good reasons.
> you might currently choose to move it bit-by-bit to Go
Not even Google, the home of Go, has been doing a C++ to Go conversion. Backend services that are still in C++ in 2023 are probably so for good reasons, most likely because they either have:
1. really high performance requirements, hence no Go.
2. low budget, and are mostly maintained as it is, hence no rewrite.
In any case, those are only a fraction of the total backend code, which is mostly PHP, Java, and Nodejs.