First off, I have personally seen, as justincormack describes, compiled Go as it currently exists being roughly comparable to Java, as it currently exists. I haven't burned much time looking around, but I was unable to find what version of Go they were using, or even what compiler for it (there are two major ones, with dramatic performance differences). Furthermore, it is a fact that Go at it's current maturity does little real optimization. Regardless of how "commonplace" languages beating Java may or may not be, Go should stand a very solid chance of doing it, provided it continues to see love.
anyway,
Java also loses handily on startup times, and only wins in runtime speeds against statically typed languages compiling to native code that lack the same tier of backing. Notice that one of the languages that beats Java is C++, possibly the single ugliest language in actual use. Practically a worse case scenario for a language developer but I don't think there has ever been a point in history which it doesn't cream Java. Hobbyist languages, which I would classify most of the languages on that list as (well, the ones that are even commonly compiled to native code in the first place...) will rarely compete with mature enterprise backed languages, but when you weight by funding, compiled languages clean house. Continued development of systems such as LLVM which blur the distinction between the two will only serve to improve the situation.
aside:
I find their Fortran statistic suspect as well. In my professional experience a well designed Fortran program will kick C's ass nearly every time. At least in scientific computing applications anyway.
The fannkuch benchmark is one where Go beats Java, and has a hugely better memory usage. But these benchmarks are highly suspect (they dropped LauJIT recentl despite it being the fastest dynamic language).
C does not have a standard threading library, which is why there is no benchmark.
Here's what you claimed - "but when you weight by funding, compiled languages clean house".
But you don't seem to have any information at all on $$$ amounts spent on the development of compiled languages (C, C++, Fortran, ...) compared to others (Java).
Obviously you don't know what would result "when you weight by funding".
If you want to ask the GCC folk for an estimate of how much of their development has been done while on the payroll of other companies, feel free to do so. I expect you will find that it is somewhere within a few orders of magnitude as what was spent on Java by Sun in the past 2 decades.
In short, my suggestion is that shittons of money has been spent on Java while relatively little money has been spent on Go. Yet somehow they are currently pretty evenhanded. You haven't been able to provide any sources that suggest other than this rather sensible claim.
I don't care about micro benchmarks, I care about real programs. When is the last time any real user said "Yeah I think I'm gonna go home tonight and fire up the N-body problem on the PS3". Write a video game in java and then tell me that it's on par with statically typed languages compiled to native code in terms of performance.
Also, this language shootout doesn't use optimized compilers for a bunch of languages like C#/F#. Also for C/C++, ICC is much faster than gcc. I would hazard a guess that there are many more than 4 language implementations that are much faster than java for real programs that allocate memory.
The fact that Go is on par with java after a couple years is impressive. It took java ~20 years to get to that point.
For C#/F# I'd suggest using the Microsoft compilers/JIT as that's a more realistic usage of C#/F#. I realize that the MSFT implementation doesn't work on Linux.
Languages aren't faster or slower, only implementations are. Look at the performance of the CINT implementation of C.
It's conceivable that on some future computing platform Ruby would be faster than C. (Eg. On a Symbolics LISP machine LISP is probably faster than C)
How is suggesting a C# implementation that you know will not work realistic?
Programmers run their programs with implementations not with languages - so what makes you think programmers are confused about that? When they say C they probably just mean the usual well known C compilers.
Today, we can only use the programming language implementations that are available today.
I am expressing concern that you don't seem to see any issue in the slightest with benchmarking an effectively Microsoft language with Microsofts stack. Good job acting indignant to avoid addressing this.
Allow me to additionally point out that this account you are posting with seems to be used solely for the purpose of trolling discussions about programming languages. Someone who only shows up for programming language discussions surely cannot be any stranger to a very mild "insult" or two.
Go is already faster than Java in half of the benchmarks, and uses dramatically less memory.
Of the benchmarks where Java wins, at least one (regexp-dna) is not related to the language at all and only to the regexp implementation, the one used there is a toy, Russ Cox already has written a much better high-performance regexp implementation based on re2 for Go which should replace the existing one very soon.
GC is the only sticky factor here.