- -Go supports effortless cross compilation (Mac, Windows, Linux) -- from my Debian board I can make a Mac executable, or a 32 or 64 bit Windows executable, even a freeBSD or Linux executable with many architectures: i386, ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8, s390x, and ppc64le. That's a killer of a feature!
-Go is pretty fast
-Go can call C code -- just in case you want speed.
-Go has pointers.
-Go is easy to learn, and (a feature that I love) as of v1.0, Go won't be adding new features.
An interesting thing pointed out by the founder of Go is that most programming languages, as they "evolve," become more like each other. Like JavaScript adops classes, etc. The interesting thing about Go is that it'll stay the same forever -- no changes from Python2.7 to Python3, and the need to update code.
What really drew me in was its cross compilation capability. To cross compile C or C++, I had to jump through a whole bunch of loops, but for go, it's as simple as: "GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 go build hello_windows.go" or "GOOS=darwin GOARCH=386 go build hello_mac.go". While I can achieve a similar effect with Java, users don't have to install anything to run a Go executable -- for all they know it could be written in C or C++, and compiled natively.
Anyway, what do you think?