> But it didn't touch the important question -- is the development time for Go faster than for scripting languages with critical sections in C?

"Writing critical sections in C" is a terrible cop-out of the Python community, by which they try to make the engineer do the compiler/VM's job.

Compare:

1) Write algorithmically efficient code.

2) Profile for hotspots.

3) Lift out the hotspots by rewriting them in C.

4) Repeat throughout the lifetime of your project.

Versus:

1) Write algorithmically efficient code.

2) There's no step two.

What winds up happening is that A) nobody does steps 1-4 with any regularity, and B) The bar at which a C rewrite is set very high, while Python is very slow across the board. The whole system winds up slow in aggregate, with only a few hotspots optimized, if any.