You say that, but because 1.5 is written in Go, it actually does significantly worse on some benchmarks and actual programs.

See: https://talks.golang.org/2015/state-of-go-may.slide#11

Note that the benchmarks game is going to count compile time against Java, but not against Go, since Go is AOT compiled and Java is JIT'd. If your app is a long-running server, you should take the benchmarks game numbers with a grain of salt.

JVM start-up, JIT, OSR etc take very little time relative to most of the workloads shown on the benchmarks game.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#java

The notable exception (not included in summary measurements) is the few tenths of a second run-time for meteor-contest. Of that few tenths of a second: JVM startup takes 95%, JIT and OSR another 4.9%.

Whatever kind-of app you have, you should take general statements about program performance with a grain of salt, there's even a page for that --

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...

Keep in mind Go 1.5 has not been released yet :-)