My sense is that most people moving to Go are coming from Node and that explains their excitement about the performance. Not many upsides when you’re already on Java.
As an interesting addendum, I found this to be a really interesting resource when comparing languages at a very base level, as it is very well written and you can actually look at the source code/ thesis papers for all of the implementations: https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages
C, Java, C# and Go all appear at the top there so it's basically a wash, +/-5%. I still think the main perception of Go as "the fastest option" on places like HN is because people are coming from some of the slower languages (Javascript, Ruby, etc).
Footnote: I don't think there's anything wrong with using a slower language, a lot of them have higher productivity overall. I also just happen to prefer programming in Java, so it's overall the best choice for most jobs for me.
I don't think thats true.
Every object in Java has something like three words of overhead; also since it doesn't have value semantics (yet) objects are typically allocated out-of-line, so an ArrayList makes a linear number of allocations, whereas a Go slice makes a constant number. Plus the binary sizes are typically much smaller; not really an expert but our observataion at work is non-trivial Java services allocate a lot of memory through classloading / JITing whereas a Go binary will typically be very small.
Basically, agreed on the GC tradeoff, but the higher memory footprint of Java mostly comes from other areas.
> Better memory usage always implies worse performance
That isn't really true. Better memory usage implies better cache-friendliness (and possibly better locality too).
That said, Go's focus may be the right one for many use cases. On a high throughput service where you would assume you want to optimize for throughput, 100 ms pause times can wreak havoc because they're unpredictable and can cause work queues to explode and such. This isn't easily mitigated by load balancing. Whereas "less efficient" GC is at least predictable and you can just add a server to balance that extra work.
Which would be Java in this case.
So few application I own have about 200 LOC of business logic and 10K LOC Spring Boot fluff along with some 60 jar files which I am not sure what they really do.
But enterprise programmers making internal software have little incentive to make their programs sleek and fast because they 1) have a captive user base who are forced to use their bad UIs, and 2) there aren't many users so you don't really need to optimize for minimal server use.
From the eyes of management, a good enterprise programmer can take a request from start to beginning and fulfill a business requirement in a reasonable amount of time. Architecture, UI, future maintainability, speed, security... that's not really on their radar at all.
There are plenty of managers who do not understand or respect feature creep and technical debt, so spending time refactoring is useless and opaque to them. Developers have no incentive to write good code, and bad developers who can talk a good game get hired on, so the codebase spirals into an unmaintainable sea of crap.
According to management, if you solve business problems, you're valuable to them. So if you care about good code, it's an uphill battle fighting for it against the other entrenched developers who really don't give a shit.
These programs usually happen to be written in Java because there are tons of Java developers out there, which is great if you don't live in a tech hub.