It goes to show the impact of optimizing from top-down instead of bottom-up can have. Go was designed with performance in mind ("mechanical sympathy") as oppose

It goes to show the impact of optimizing from top-down instead of bottom-up can have. Go was designed with performance in mind ("mechanical sympathy") as opposed to most other GC languages for which performance was an afterthought. If you get high-level language constructs right, you'll get great performance by default, even with a simple compiler: - structs instead of objects - value types - exposed pointers - straightforward allocation semantics Most compilers out there are busy fighting bad language designs. There's only so much a compiler can do when faced with fat objects hidden behind a spider web of pointers. So they have to do these microoptimizations to claw back at least some performance.