Lots of small differences mostly. Go gives you control of memory layout, it has better ergonomics (type inference), simpler tooling, no dependency on IDEs (you

Lots of small differences mostly. Go gives you control of memory layout, it has better ergonomics (type inference), simpler tooling, no dependency on IDEs (you can if you want but most use vim or emacs), built in testing, better standard library (production ready HTTP server, JSON, templating, etc), low latency GC out of the box, simpler GC tuning, statically compiled binaries, fast startup times, simpler primitives (e.g., no exceptions or inheritance), implicit interfaces/structural subtyping etc. all while competing with Java for performance. This is my list of things that Go does better than Java; I don't want to give the impression that Go is perfect--I have lots of criticisms for it (no generics, hacky workarounds for sum types, error handling is often too simple out of the box, no decent REPL, etc), but it lets me be more productive than any language I've used to date.