Also, as can be seen, go is not a well-designed language, having language warts we knew for 50 years. I would take the creators’ claims with a huge grain of salt.
I do think highly of Rob Pike and Ken Thompson for their IT work, but they are simply not good at language design, which just shows that PL design is quite unlike working on an OS.
And someone that makes that assertion with a straight face without this caveat is not someone that should be dissing Rob Pike about language design.
why do you think so? Their goal was to be much faster, but I can't find much benchmarks..
Unless you meant that Java's AOT compilation is faster than Go's?
Also, there are single-pass compilers that produce machine code, they are not fundamentally slower than a byte code generator. Of course extensive optimizations will be more expensive.
One of the explicit goals, by Go's creators, was fast build times. I still remember Rob Pike introducing Go during an all-hands at Google, where he talked about the very long build times for C++ and Java in Google's monorepo, and then showed some promising demos. (Most of us rolled our eyes at it then, because it was just a "hello world", but it's quite impressive how the language has evolved and remained true to its goals.)
> - it is just a plain language where the compiler can just spit out vaguely optimized code, and call it a day.
It's a simple language, but I wouldn't call it plain, nor characterize the optimizers that way.