Go is like a modern Python + a shell scripting language and it is quite good at that but do have in mind that complete reliability and type safety aren’t its first priorities. It was designed to be mostly easy to pick up by former C++ and Java engineers (source: unofficial testimonials from people who chatted with the creators long ago, shared on HN). This severely reduces its potential usefulness as a good native bridge from higher-level languages despite continuous heroic efforts like cgo.
This doesn’t detract from its usefulness in general. A lot of excellent programs have already been written in Go. I just get kind of nervous about when will the security researches start finding easy ways to pwn Go programs, but let’s see what the future brings.
As for Rust, I share your assessment – it’s indeed a very good native bridge and not only for Elixir. It has an amazing tool that allows it to parse existing C/C++ header files and generate Rust wrappers for almost any [well-written and following good practices] native C/C++ library. From then on it’s not much work to make a few hand adjustments and boom, you have a Rust wrapper towards insert-existing-well-known-native-library-here.
That makes it an excellent tool to both (1) provide a gradual migration path towards pure Rust should the original C/C++ authors choose to go down that path and (2) still give a Rust developer as close to the original library code as possible in the meantime. And that’s not even mentioning how amazingly good a language Rust is.
As for other such seemingly natural pairs as Elixir and Rust, I am not sure but I am curious myself.