There's sure an interesting discussion to have in choosing Go vs Java, but this post doesn't contribute. What you want to compare is (the result of) GraalVM's n

There's sure an interesting discussion to have in choosing Go vs Java, but this post doesn't contribute. What you want to compare is (the result of) GraalVM's native-image vs Go rather than traditional Java byte codes execution on the JVM (which, for all we know, is more performant than Go-compiled binaries), making the post's first point (that you have to schlepp around a JVM) moot. Also, what is a "system programming language" anyway? I'd say C, C++, Rust, and other languages with zero-cost abstractions qualify, but certainly not garbage-collected languages like Go and Java. If you compare GCd languages, a discussion of the range of garbage collectors available on the respective platforms would be more helpful. For JVM, there are plenty; for GraalVM AOT/native-image, there's only SerialGC and G1GC (enterprise edition only) and not even CMS; what options are there for Go? Not meant as Java fanboyism. My initial reaction towards Go was that I liked the apparent simplicity and freshness, until I saw that Go has already accumulated a surprising mass of idiosyncrasy. That k8s was ported from Java to Go also makes an interesting point of discussion, in that these two languages can target a similar problem space (apart from Java's bread-and butter "enterprise" workloads with massive use of reflection).