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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The programs in the shootout are nothing like the programs people typically run and write. For instance, most of the programs I write do a lot of I/O. The shootout programs do none.

Which is as well, because you only want to benchmark for CPU bound parts of the program.

IO is the same speed for all languages, so it cancels out.

>It certainly does in cluster environments where you regularly spin up new server instances.

Not really a common use case.

>It's also important for command-line tools.

I don't think command-line-tools are Go's or Java's niche.

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> IO is the same speed for all languages, so it cancels out.

That's not true, particularly in concurrent systems. Recent improvements to Go's scheduler (that make it more aware of various I/O concerns) have made it 2x faster under some workloads. You don't just optimize the compiler to produce the tightest code, you must also finesse its integration with the rest of the world.

> Not really a common use case.

If you say so.

> I don't think command-line-tools are Go's or Java's niche.

There are a lot of Go command-line tools out there. I think Go is a superb language for this area.

>>Not really a common use case. >If you say so

Why the irony? How many cluster deployments you know where you "spin up instances all the time"???

Compared to general server / network application programming done in both Java and Go it's LESS than a drop in the bucket.

If you work somewhere that this does not hold, you could also be an outlier.

    > Why the irony? How many cluster deployments you know 
    > where you "spin up instances all the time"???

Any cluster environment whose applications abide 12-Factor semantics stands to benefit greatly from low startup times. This describes both SOA environments like Amazon and Netflix, and PaaS environments like Heroku and [what is enabled by] Docker.

http://12factor.net

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