Go is not very much like c. Pointers are very close to reified addresses, but much of their use comes from manual memory management. If you have to use GC, its not clear what you gain from the semantic similarities with c. Furthermore, it is a prescriptive ecosystem that is quite restrictive. The runtime is not very friendly to ffi. It is not a suitable systems language due to the GC and associated complexities (interfaces should not mandate GC roots).