I don't follow it much. The language is very good for its purpose (a compiled production language for large codebases that isn't painful to use) and the implementation is great, but I don't know much about the community itself.
When I worked at Google, I talked to a couple of the Go developers and they were really sharp guys, so that's a strong signal.
The thing is most modern languages we use can be compiled to native code ahead of time.
The fact that most people tend to use VM based implementations, tends to be related to:
- not having the knowledge that implementation != language
- not willing to pay for third parties native compilers
- AOT compilation in some cases does not provide a proper optimizing compiler and ends up providing lesser experience than the JIT.
Finally being compiled to native code, instead of relying on a JIT, tends to be more beneficial to client and embedded environments. Not so much for server side, except for the initial startup time.
I was also using it in the beginning given its Oberon influence, but nowadays I am back to more CS friendly languages, given my background.
But I miss the fact that most strong typed languages nowadays don't compile directly to native code in their canonical implementations.
As for the community, yes they may have some strong opinions, specially in the most polemic areas around Go, but they are nice guys.
When I worked at Google, I talked to a couple of the Go developers and they were really sharp guys, so that's a strong signal.