Hmm, there's a slight disparity between the quote and their benchmark table, which shows Clojure and Go neck and neck in the request/sec dept. I guess all the system re-architecting explains most of the difference.
In any case, as the article text also mentions, on the Go side they are using a complete reverse-proxy library that's included with the Go stdlib, which can be a significant advantage aside from the properties of the language itself.
But then it seems they ended up reimplementing many things that the JVM provides: "In order to achieve out of the box functionality such as CPU and memory usage metrics, business logic counters and more - we needed to write basically this entire stack from scratch, which enabled us a much more rapid deep dive of the intricacies of Golang."
In any case, as the article text also mentions, on the Go side they are using a complete reverse-proxy library that's included with the Go stdlib, which can be a significant advantage aside from the properties of the language itself.
But then it seems they ended up reimplementing many things that the JVM provides: "In order to achieve out of the box functionality such as CPU and memory usage metrics, business logic counters and more - we needed to write basically this entire stack from scratch, which enabled us a much more rapid deep dive of the intricacies of Golang."