Of course one shouldn't mistake those. But one has to understand, a tool is only as valuable as it actually produces result, not as what it could produce given a theoretical perfect programmer. C is an extremely capable programming language judging on "what you could do with it", but in reality, most programmers fail to create robust C code. And most Java code suffers from programmers using it in a less than optimal manner.

Also, Go does not suffer from some fundamental Java problems, though they slowly get corrected. Go has value types, unboxed arrays. Generally, no struct in Go is boxed automatically. You have first class functions in Go and of course, it is statically compiled. It is true, that Hotspot often produces very good code, but for a lot of szenarios, a statically compiled Go executable beats it, as run-time compilation is not required.