Some developers have noted Go’s lack of features or a few other things: no exceptions, nils instead of options, inability to specify dependency versions, mark and sweep GC, no macros, no generics.

Not having exceptions is one thing and probably a valid opinion, but specifying library dependencies as whatever today's HEAD commit is on a GitHub project always seemed to me incompatible with writing reliable software. Until reading this article (and learning about godep) I thought that I must be misunderstanding how dependencies are managed in Go, because how could that possibly work? In practice how have people been dealing with this before tools like godep?