Golang doesn't fill quite the same niche, though: it's garbage collected, for example. I'd personally question whether we need the main pros of C for basic command line tools (that's a topic for another time), but it does explain why we're seeing far fewer "rewrite it in Go" sentiment. If memory safety was the only relevant metric, we would've rewritten everything in Java decades ago.
Language simplicity also isn't that important. Usage-wise you're missing out on a lot of potential features and benefits, and implementation-wise you're not gaining a lot as everyone just writes LLVM frontends these days. If language simplicity was that important, we'd all be writing Lisp these days.
> If memory safety was the only relevant metric, we would've rewritten everything in Java decades ago.
well for a good 15-20 years the jvm had awful startup times which probably was why it was not attractive as a systems language. Does being garbage collected matter for a tool like cat? I would say no
Language simplicity also isn't that important. Usage-wise you're missing out on a lot of potential features and benefits, and implementation-wise you're not gaining a lot as everyone just writes LLVM frontends these days. If language simplicity was that important, we'd all be writing Lisp these days.