We rely on both Go and Kafka a lot at Segment. Unfortunately, the state of the Go client libraries for Kafka at the time of this writing was not ideal. sarama, which is by far the most popular but is quite difficult to work with. It is poorly documented, the API exposes low level concepts of the Kafka protocol, and it doesn't support recent Go features like contexts. It also passes all values as pointers which causes large numbers of dynamic memory allocations, more frequent garbage...