But Java is inspired by Smalltalk, which is a late-binding language that defers most things to runtime. I believe in Java you can generate bytecode directly as you’re parsing the source file.

So which of my statements do you take issue with?

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.

Both statements, because unless otherwise qualified you're comparing apples to oranges when you say Java compiles as fast as Go. There's always going to be more overhead on running the Java bytecode on the JVM than there will be when running the native instructions generated by a compiler (even as "unoptimized" as Go is).

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.

> It is not faster at compilation than Java

why do you think so? Their goal was to be much faster, but I can't find much benchmarks..

Java is compiled to bytecode, for later compilation to machine code at runtime (JIT). Go is compiled AOT, straight to machine code. It makes no sense to compare them.

Unless you meant that Java's AOT compilation is faster than Go's?

The parent comment explicitly mentioned that Java is slow at compilation, which is just false.

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.