Note that neither CockroachDB or TiDB use Golang for their actual storage engine, which is in both cases written in C (RocksDB). They do use Golang for SQL parsing though, which is what this post was mostly about.
VictoriaMetrics [1] is written entirely in Go. By default it uses canonical zstd library for compression (the library is written in C), but it supports pure Go mode when built with `make victoria-metrics-pure`. In this mode it uses zstd implementation written in Go [2].
rust would be more appropriate if your intention was to use this in production. Databases ad GC don't mix well. (its done but it makes tuning a nightmare)
As much as I love rust, its learning curve is high and I'm sure Op doesn't want to spend half his article teaching all the intricacies of types and the borrow checker. Go is easy to learn over a weekend so its probably a better medium for illustrating the concepts as everything is laid out simply.
A garbage collector is not inherently incompatible with a low-latency database. I was generally very happy with the performance of Go's garbage collector enough to have built Prometheus, the time series database, on it back in 2012, when the collector was considerably more naive.
Truth is I've written about how to parse in better languages before (JavaScript, Python, Standard ML, etc.) and I wanted to figure out a good approach for doing it in Go.
As for databases and GC, you may be right but there are still major databases out there written in Java for example.
