I recommend trying gccgo, the Go compiler for the GCC suite. (GCC 4.7.1 and later have Go built in.) In my experience it is (at -O2) much faster than Go's own

I recommend trying gccgo, the Go compiler for the GCC suite. (GCC 4.7.1 and later have Go built in.) In my experience it is (at -O2) much faster than Go's own compiler. GCC, after all, has because a bunch of advanced optimizers with a long history of development behind them, and Go's own compiler does not. My recolleciton is that Go's own compiler was intended as a "suboptimal but correct" reference compiler, but this may have changed.