Hmm, I guess I was going of benchmarks such as these, which suggest Go is, well, faster some of the time?

https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/go.html

However, perhaps as you indicate these are including JVM startup time and thus tainting the results. For some reason I had gotten it into my head that Go was faster than Java, but it's been a couple of years since I've used either one, so I definitely may be off on that point.