> GC is a showstopper for my day job (hard realtime industrial machine control/robotics)

Which is a very niche use case to begin with, isn't it? It doesn't really contradict what the parent comment stated about Go feeling like modern C (with a boehm gc included if you will). We're using it this way and it feels just fine. I'd be happy to see parts of our C codebase rewritten in Go, but since that code is security sensitive and has already been through a number of security reviews there's little motivation to do so.