Seems like the buzz around Go over the last couple of years since its 1.0 launch hasn't just been hot air. There were a couple of high profile projects such as Cloudflare's Railgun back in 2012/23, which many (inc. myself) suspected may have been at least partially sponsored / encouraged by Google themselves to get #golang into the public eye. Go was everywhere on Hacker News for a while, and it was almost universally well-received. And then, just as quickly, it slipped off the radar (mine at least).

It's now back front-and-centre, at the heart of some of the most interesting projects out there - Docker being the poster-child, but also Skydock / SkyDNS and Consul, both of which have had a lot of publicity recently. It seems like Go has settled into a groove; there are a few web frameworks out there (Goji, Martini, Revel), but most people seem to have followed Google's lead and used Go for lower-level system applications - DNS servers, high-performance network-aware services. In fact, it appears as if Go has become the go-to language for such applications.

It's hard to exaggerate how impressive this is - in two years Google has managed to build a community around a brand-new language, and got it into several very high-profile production applications, with very little fanfare (compared to, for instance, Java back in the 1990s, or the .NET family of languages in the early 2000s.)

It remains to be seen whether they can pull of the same trick with Dart.