> I'd probably be most tempted to check out Go if I was working on something that absolutely had to wring the best possible performance out of my hardware. I don't honestly know that much about it, but it has a reputation for getting you most of the performance of C++ without the complexity.

Go isn't billed as a language that is designed to do that. It's faster than Ruby and Python, for sure, but it made many runtime performance sacrifices in the name of ease of use and compilation speed.