But those would be minor gripes if it had real good performance, which it does not, considering it's a statically typed, compiled language. It's been around 2x

But those would be minor gripes if it had real good performance, which it does not, considering it's a statically typed, compiled language. It's been around 2x faster than Python in most of my uses (which don't involve parallelism), which doesn't really tempt to use Go over Python. If it could get closer to C++/Java performance it would be nice. I haven't seen anything in the language design that would make further speed improvements especially difficult, so I'm hopeful that the speed of compiled code will improve as time goes by. I agree with you that if they get some more talented developers, that would really help. As an aside, after reading about the LuaJIT trace compiler implementation, I am quite intimidated by the amount of knowledge and skill that is needed to write really fast code on modern processors (even embedded ones).