Go’s runtime C to Go rewrite, by the numbers

Why Go?<p>I had a chance to do a bit of Go a year or so ago, and found the language very (how to put it?) bland. There just didn&#x27;t seem to be anything surprising or obviously better about it.<p>If the alternative is C++, I can understand the appeal of garbage collection and getting away from the complexities of the STL. But Java provides both. Anyone want to make the case for Go over Java?

What&#x27;s interesting is amount of C and Go code being so proportional - for every 100 lines of C code rewritten you seem to get 100 lines of Go.<p>It surprises me, because from what I&#x27;ve seen Go seems to be much higher level language. Or are those just all the `if err != nil` lines?

Cool visualization. What causes the spikes? Code merges?

Spoiler: Flash plugin would let you see a timeline graph showing lines-of-C vs lines-of-Go in the go project.<p>(Strange that a Google Docs widget requires Flash...)