I've only worked in PHP once, in college, so take the following with whatever level of credibility you wish. I generally work in infosec related projects that often come at strange intersections, such as embedded systems and web applications or real time operating systems in safety critical situations which must deal with data from unreliable or weakly secured sources (802.11, LoRa etc.) So, mostly my experience with Go is the need to write one-off tools, which usually provide either a CLI or web-ui, to inspect things embedded devices are doing as a sort of "black box."
I'm sure generics are going to be useful in some instances. Also of note 1.18 is bringing built in fuzzing, which is nice.
Where I'm getting my margin of benefit over writing tooling in say Python or Ruby, or other languages that fit this domain:
1. Fewer choices: The build system, module layout, and networking APIs don't lead me down the road of trying to figure out which library is best, thereby wasting time learning different libraries. I have never had any desire to google around for external libraries etc. Everything seems to just work fine.
2. Clear design intent: Once you've figured out what you're supposed to do with language idioms, like passing around ReadClosers or whatever it becomes super easy to read code written by other people who've also come to understand the intent. I don't notice this until I try to go back to doing something in Python and remember how vastly many approaches folks take to the same problem (like how should a database object be passed around.)
3. Works for my workflow: I spend most of my life in terminals fussing with serial communication, or fighting with mqtt or an APK that won't load like I expect, etc. The tooling with Go for nvim is incredible. I've found that now that I've gotten fairly fluent in the language I will often crack off small scripts in Go to automate dumb things I don't want to do in Bash or whatever, this is maybe an anti-pattern, depending on who you talk to.
Summary: My big margin over other languages just comes from consistency of design and interfaces and the fact that Go integrates with my workflow. It's very easy to figure out how to do a thing the first time I'm working on it. It's also easy to throw together a one off tool in an afternoon, use it for two weeks, push it up to my github and forget I did it until the next time I need it.
YMMV
I'm sure generics are going to be useful in some instances. Also of note 1.18 is bringing built in fuzzing, which is nice.
Where I'm getting my margin of benefit over writing tooling in say Python or Ruby, or other languages that fit this domain:
1. Fewer choices: The build system, module layout, and networking APIs don't lead me down the road of trying to figure out which library is best, thereby wasting time learning different libraries. I have never had any desire to google around for external libraries etc. Everything seems to just work fine.
2. Clear design intent: Once you've figured out what you're supposed to do with language idioms, like passing around ReadClosers or whatever it becomes super easy to read code written by other people who've also come to understand the intent. I don't notice this until I try to go back to doing something in Python and remember how vastly many approaches folks take to the same problem (like how should a database object be passed around.)
3. Works for my workflow: I spend most of my life in terminals fussing with serial communication, or fighting with mqtt or an APK that won't load like I expect, etc. The tooling with Go for nvim is incredible. I've found that now that I've gotten fairly fluent in the language I will often crack off small scripts in Go to automate dumb things I don't want to do in Bash or whatever, this is maybe an anti-pattern, depending on who you talk to.
Summary: My big margin over other languages just comes from consistency of design and interfaces and the fact that Go integrates with my workflow. It's very easy to figure out how to do a thing the first time I'm working on it. It's also easy to throw together a one off tool in an afternoon, use it for two weeks, push it up to my github and forget I did it until the next time I need it.
YMMV