Go Raised The Bar

Go raised the bar for new language distributions:

• UTF-8 code
• Testing, benchmarking, and profiling built in
• Single command line tool
• Build tool that leaves code directories clean
• Package manager
• Package doc browser
• Standard code style and formatter
• Fast builds
• Language spec with grammar and thorough library documentation
• Uniform, batteries-included standard library
• Concurrency support and automatic parallelism, sync and atomic libs, race detector
• Interfaces, not inheritance
• Vendoring support
• Cross compilation
• Static linking only for simple deployments
• Tabs, not spaces
• No semicolon line terminators
• Trailing commas in lists to minimize diffs
• Static types
• Default values for uninitialized variables
• Built-in comparisons and hashing
• Safety (e.g. bounds checking)
• Managed memory (uses GC, but could use ARC)
• Simple encapsulation model (package level only)
• Use of lower-vs-uppercase for meaning (exports in this case)
• Simple selective build inclusion with tags and file name suffixes
• Built-in code generation
• Packages buildable without make files, just code
• “Panic” program crashes for programmer errors
• No unused local variables or imports
• No build warnings or other output noise
• Qualified imports only (idiomatically)

If it doesn’t do these, it’s already outmoded. Looking at you, Swift.