Just curious, what were the tradeoffs for profiling the Python code and rewriting slow parts in C vs total rewrite in Go? For high level languages, the usual argument has been to rewrite just the slow parts in C or some other low level language.
We needed some massive speed improvements, I'm talking in the order of 100X faster. The nature of our algorithms was such that they could be done in parallel (i.e map/reduce) - an ideal candidate for Go's goroutines. We actually tried to make it parallelizable at first in Python, using gevent (and even just multiprocessing) and the results were not great.
One other aspect that really guided us towards Go was memory usage. Python was just sucking up so much memory whereas our Go implementation thus far is so much thinner.
It's funny that you mention that, because in computationally intensive work memory management is an issue with Go. E.g. I wrote a maximum entropy parameter estimator in Go, which was terribly slow until I circumvented the garbage collector by preallocating a huge block of memory and doing my own management. In C malloc() and free()-ing had practically no overhead. After putting the Go garbage collector out of the game, the Go version was approximately within 2x of the C version.
I am interested how Go gave you one or two orders of magnitude speedup, while rewriting hot spots in C didn't...
paralellization
So it comes down to which will be more of a win for you and your product. Go has a big advantage here IMO though because of static typing AND performance increase.
Of course, you are correct. Rewriting in any other language with static typing or an available compiler implementation would also provide the benefits of static typing and detection of runtime errors.
On the other hand I think youth generation of programmers lack exposition to programming languages, like we used to have in the old days, hence they make quite limited comparisons.