One other aspect that really guided us towards Go was memory usage. Python was just sucking up so much memory whereas our Go implementation thus far is so much

One other aspect that really guided us towards Go was memory usage. Python was just sucking up so much memory whereas our Go implementation thus far is so much thinner. It's funny that you mention that, because in computationally intensive work memory management is an issue with Go. E.g. I wrote a maximum entropy parameter estimator in Go, which was terribly slow until I circumvented the garbage collector by preallocating a huge block of memory and doing my own management. In C malloc() and free()-ing had practically no overhead. After putting the Go garbage collector out of the game, the Go version was approximately within 2x of the C version. I am interested how Go gave you one or two orders of magnitude speedup, while rewriting hot spots in C didn't...