Also, what 'n ddrylliog said about C isn't necessarily true – it did have a large company behind it, Bell Labs, which at some point was or is a branch of At&t.

In contrast, V8 is a core component of Google's official browser (itself soon to be the core component of their official operating system), and has been tasked with quickly and efficiently executing the heaps of Javascript that Google's user-facing applications are built from. I would say that falls squarely under “need for speed,” and the regular drumbeat of V8 releases and improvements speaks for itself.

So the amenability of a language to optimization has to tempered by the amount of resources put towards that optimization. Until I see evidence that Go is moving at a faster clip than, say, Simple (their BASIC-for-Android lang they released this summer) I'm going to consider it someone's 20% project.

That's not exactly the tool I'm going to reach for when I'm implementing a fast web server, especially if I have to give up all the cool features that languages like Scala have.

Erlang is also an environment: you've got tools letting you manage the VM's processes (like etop, which is unix's top for Erlang), connect to remote shells, the OTP framework, profilers, loggers, Dialyzer, etc.

On the other hand, Go has very interesting concepts that are not part of Erlang, such as their implementation of interface types that turn out to be a bit like compiler-checked duck typing [from what I understand]. Go is also supposed to be much faster than Erlang, although this should be no secret.

This is not to say Go can't be used to make reliable stuff, but it's going in a pretty different direction than where Erlang is going. Those who consider Go and Erlang to be competitors seem to be those who reduce Erlang to 'a language that does lots of concurrent stuff' and not much more. The reduction is understandable, but it misses a lot of what's important.

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