Go's TLS and crypto is across the board better than Java's. I wouldn't choose a language based on its TLS stack, but if you were in a weird position where you had to do that, you'd pick Go.
It's not a fair comparison: Go has a TLS stack that is shepherded by Adam Langley, who is one of the Internet's foremost experts on TLS.
Perhaps not but it is astonishing to me that many (most?) of the comparisons between Go and Java omit security. In particular, it's hard see how you can assert Go (or any language for that matter) is well-suited for distributed computing without considering issues like authentication and encryption.
Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. [2] cites use of Go in financial apps without a single mention of security.
I don't understand this argument. I'm a security practitioner and, in particular, a software security expert. I don't think either language is intrinsically more or less secure. But Go does have a better TLS stack.
Building secure systems in Java requires a lot of arcane knowledge due to the complexity of the libraries. For instance, you can't just throw a switch and convert all socket-based communication to TLS. I'm not arguing that Go is necessarily better but it's a useful consideration in language evaluation.
It's not time that makes Java's TLS stack bad; it's that the TLS stacks are afterthoughts. Java could be competitive with Go if it attracted someone of Langley's caliber to manage a coherent, designed-for-security TLS stack, and then the ecosystem was managed to ensure that everyone used that stack.
It's not a fair comparison: Go has a TLS stack that is shepherded by Adam Langley, who is one of the Internet's foremost experts on TLS.