Thanks for the cogent response, not sure why I was modded down, but never mind. I've been doing a few small experiments in Go just to see what it's like and have loved the compilation time, lack of cruft like header files, and the simplicity. The standard library for Go reminds me of Ruby in many ways as it mostly works exactly as you'd expect with few surprises, and it covers a surprisingly broad range.
I agree that hyperbole on the future of computing is overblown (I wonder if Rust now feels it has to compete with Go for hype!), but there are a lot of things in say Go which are not as nice in C, unicode strings, loops, slices, etc. So it's not entirely pointless to start again with all we have learned since 1969. All of the little niggles in C can be worked around, but overall Go feels like a cleaned up version of C which took a few ideas from C++ and other OOP languages and left the rest out as unnecessary. Given the problems vast hierarchies of classes sometimes cause, and the huge and growing complexity of C++, I can sympathise with that point of view.
To say that there are no tools or libraries is exaggerating slightly, there are tools for Go (see http://golang.org/pkg/), and books, just not as many, which is quite normal for a young language which has just hit 1.0. For Rust there will be far fewer as it is even less developed, but that's to be expected. As you say if Go or Rust ever do become popular it will be over decades, not within a year or two.
I agree that hyperbole on the future of computing is overblown (I wonder if Rust now feels it has to compete with Go for hype!), but there are a lot of things in say Go which are not as nice in C, unicode strings, loops, slices, etc. So it's not entirely pointless to start again with all we have learned since 1969. All of the little niggles in C can be worked around, but overall Go feels like a cleaned up version of C which took a few ideas from C++ and other OOP languages and left the rest out as unnecessary. Given the problems vast hierarchies of classes sometimes cause, and the huge and growing complexity of C++, I can sympathise with that point of view.
To say that there are no tools or libraries is exaggerating slightly, there are tools for Go (see http://golang.org/pkg/), and books, just not as many, which is quite normal for a young language which has just hit 1.0. For Rust there will be far fewer as it is even less developed, but that's to be expected. As you say if Go or Rust ever do become popular it will be over decades, not within a year or two.