Wierd. I’d always thought of go as a slower Java with an shallower pool of good libraries and weak dev tools. Is the compiler and gc that good? Maybe I’ll have to give it another try.
Depends on what you're targeting. For raw computation, Go's similar and sometimes noticeably faster, even after hotspot has its turn. For garbage collection pause time, Go's rather amazing, typically measuring less than a millisecond even for gigabytes of heap mem[1]. For bin startup time (e.g. for a CLI tool) try Go instead just because it'll be done way before the JVM even hands control to your code.
For dev tools, oh hell yes. Stick to Java. Go comes with some nice ones out-of-the-box which is always appreciated, but the ecosystem of stuff for Java is among the very best, and even the standard "basic" stuff vastly out-does Go's builtins.
I’m not saying don’t look at other languages, but don’t do so given what was said. Java still runs better than Go. Hadoop, et al won’t necessarily run better as C++ or Rust. Distributed system performance is often dominated by setup and other negotiating between the components in the system. Java still has better, well tested in prod libs. Shiny is not better.
Anecdotally from my own use cases, I’ve found Go to be good for problems easily made parallel. This is especially true for things that commonly fall under “microservices.”
On the other hand, for more intensive work, I’ve found it doesn’t perform as well as JVM-based applications. A lot of this is either JRuby or data models in Java doing interesting things with data structures.
Finally, for sheer processing speed, we’ve started converting some of our components to Rust. This has a 3-4x speed advantage to Java and Go for similar implementations.
Again - all anecdotes and I’m not really in a position to deeply explain how it all works (proprietary, etc). Just my two cents.
