In that sense, Java and C# both have control too.

There are lots of cases in which escape analysis falls down. In particular, higher order control flow (closures/interfaces) will always cause it to fail, until Go implements some sort of higher order control flow analysis (which I doubt it will). Go uses interfaces a lot.

C# doesn't have escape analysis, but it has stack-allocated value types. Java doesn't have stack-allocated value types (yet), but it has escape analysis. It seems a lot harder to me to reason about escape analysis without value types, and I have no idea what happens in C# if you take a reference to a value type (i.e., is it moved to the heap?).

I never meant to imply escape analysis was somehow perfect; only that it is (mostly) easy to reason about.

Can I say X is a value-type(or better annotate it in declaration)? If not then I don't have that control.

Your compiler doesn't know your data access patterns, dataset size or a myriad of other factors that you need to tune if you really want to get full utilization from your hardware. To be clear I'm talking about ~5% of software out there, but when you need it you really need it.

Yes, the distinction between value and pointer types is explicit in the language, so you have all the control. This is, why you also have more control about the memory layout than in Java, which makes a huge difference in performance.

For the time being, until Java 10 gets released.

But how things are going regarding Java releases, Go could even get generics before Java 10 gets released.

Yes, it has value and pointer types, just like C (except without pointer arithmetic).