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Go has MULTIPLE compilers, because Go is a language spec, not a compiler. Hence GCCGO (which for example, takes advantage of some of those GCC optimizations) can be used.

Additionally, in most benchmarks, Go does fairly well and is young and constantly improving: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

You will also find Nimrod / Jester in those benchmarks, and can compare the performance for yourself.

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Pedantry. When people talk about Go, they usually mean the official implementation.

gccgo has too many issues (lags behind release, requires gcc recompile, etc.) to be useful to most people.

I disagree. I know most Go shops I have dealt with at least have looked into gccgo. We use gccgo in the wild (for all our image processing components), because it gave us a nice performance boost. With good testing, you can easily do A/B testing using gccgo to see where it makes sense for you in production.

We have to dig through 30TB of images -- so the performance benefits we got from gccgo were worth the trivial effort it took to implement.

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