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The language was designed by an expert on Wirth-style languages plus the two inventors of C.Did Dennis Ritchie have a hand in creating Go? I must have missed that.
While Ken Thompson's earlier B language no doubt had an influence on C, Dennis Ritchie is widely regarded as the creator of C, which is really rather different from B, borrowing more heavily from BCPL and Algol-68. As an early (and heavy) user of C (perhaps the earliest, besides Ritchie himself), I'm willing to concede that he had enough input on C's design to be called a co-designer or co-creator. But which other "inventor of C" played a role in the creation of Go?
I also find it hard to label Rob Pike as an expert in any kind of language design. An expert in windowing systems and concurrency, perhaps, but language design? Hell, no. Even his earlier design, Newsqueak, was more of an experiment in concurrency than in language design—and it notably was a collaboration with Luca Cardelli, an expert in ML and OOP who also worked on Modula-3, and whose influence can be seen in Modula-3's several very ML-like constructs. Articles like this one[1] by Pike only serve to reinforce my thoughts that he, though a rather smart guy otherwise, is really rather ignorant about language design and about the role of types in programming in general.
> The Wirth languages ... had GC's but also allowed manual management.
None of Wirth's languages had GC until Oberon, as far as I'm aware. And spiritual successors by other groups, like Object Pascal and Ada, never really picked up on GC, either (Ada had GC as an optional part of the standard, but was removed in the latest standard because it was so rarely provided by implementations). As far as I can tell, Modula-3 is the only other "Wirth-style" language to provide GC.
Modula-3 was indeed a great language, and I think it's a real shame that it didn't get picked up more widely. At a time, it had several really solid implementations, and the language's definition is very short while still providing a plethora of useful features for programmers. The silver lining is that it was, at least, a very influential language, despite its limited adoption.
Oberon, on the other hand, was a very spartan language that offered little in terms of features, and it exhibited that Wirth really didn't grok OOP at the time he designed it (which, if I recall correctly, is something he later admitted, though I'm having trouble finding a citation at the moment). Some of Oberon's issues were fixed in later versions of the language, but some of its issues were also "doubled down" in later versions, as well.
> Another alternative was Delphi, which succeeded for a while. Way more productive and crash-resilient than using VC++.
Delphi was indeed a real alternative for a while, and while you're right that it was more productive than VC++, that's not saying much. Later versions of Delphi grew to C++ levels of size, complexity, and hairiness, and that's reflected in Free Pascal's implementation, as well. It's something that I've lamented on more than one occasion because I remember how great it was and feel as though it could still be great with a bit of streamlining.
[1]: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...