> I worked on GNOME for a summer, and can see Go being a viable option for DE's.
Desktop applications are not very demanding. You can write them in scripting languages like Python or JavaScript, both has been done in Gnome. The libraries/toolkits are more demanding.
> Haskell has proven gc language is fast enough for a WM (xmonad).
> However my original statement defined systems as kernel code
Rob Pike (one of the Go creators) seems to define it differently:
"We designed it to be a systems level language because the problems we do at Google are systems level, right? Web servers and database systems, and storage systems and those are systems. Not operating systems, I don't know that Go would be a good operating system language but I am not sure it wouldn't be, what was interesting was because of the approach we took in the design of the language, somewhat to our surprise it turned out to be a really nice general purpose language."
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/pike-google-go
Desktop applications are not very demanding. You can write them in scripting languages like Python or JavaScript, both has been done in Gnome. The libraries/toolkits are more demanding.
> Haskell has proven gc language is fast enough for a WM (xmonad).
https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo
> However my original statement defined systems as kernel code
Rob Pike (one of the Go creators) seems to define it differently:
"We designed it to be a systems level language because the problems we do at Google are systems level, right? Web servers and database systems, and storage systems and those are systems. Not operating systems, I don't know that Go would be a good operating system language but I am not sure it wouldn't be, what was interesting was because of the approach we took in the design of the language, somewhat to our surprise it turned out to be a really nice general purpose language." http://www.infoq.com/interviews/pike-google-go