I recall hearing about Don Syme (F#'s creator) talking with the guys working on garbage collection in .NET and when they saw his allocation numbers, they pretty much said that "this much allocation means there's a bug in the program". Different languages with different paradigms and idioms call for different collection strategy; being extremely into the imperative camp, Go programmers tend to hammer away at data structures rather than copy then like is more common in Java (and even more common in functional languages). So I guess that a less polished GC will do an okay job for Go longer than it would for Java.