"I think the truth is actually sadder: I think most programming languages and their standard libraries just have a terrible story around I/O and asynchronicity."
Whenever I post this sort of claim, I try to make it clear that it's not really "Go triumphalism", because I agree with you. It ought to be just as easy in a lot of other languages too. It's not a matter of features, or missing features, or features at all.
C and C++ both have a number of abstractions I've seen on this idea, but they aren't compatible and not universal, so using them is a pain because you pretty much have to adapt everything yourself into whatever you are using. (C is particularly problematic; two libraries or even just two adaptors to some particular IO facility can be API compatible but still not work together properly if they have different ideas about memory ownership. C++ can still get into that problem though my perception is there's a better understanding of the problems, if nothing else. Rust has a huge advantage on that front.) Go had enough leadership that everybody has the same abstraction out of the box, and you end up very encouraged by the community to conform to it unless you have good reasons. Good reasons exist; I've got some things that wrap io.Readers but just can't be io.Readers on their own because the abstraction doesn't fit. But they are the exceptions, and I don't see them often.
Whenever I post this sort of claim, I try to make it clear that it's not really "Go triumphalism", because I agree with you. It ought to be just as easy in a lot of other languages too. It's not a matter of features, or missing features, or features at all.
C and C++ both have a number of abstractions I've seen on this idea, but they aren't compatible and not universal, so using them is a pain because you pretty much have to adapt everything yourself into whatever you are using. (C is particularly problematic; two libraries or even just two adaptors to some particular IO facility can be API compatible but still not work together properly if they have different ideas about memory ownership. C++ can still get into that problem though my perception is there's a better understanding of the problems, if nothing else. Rust has a huge advantage on that front.) Go had enough leadership that everybody has the same abstraction out of the box, and you end up very encouraged by the community to conform to it unless you have good reasons. Good reasons exist; I've got some things that wrap io.Readers but just can't be io.Readers on their own because the abstraction doesn't fit. But they are the exceptions, and I don't see them often.