You find it unlikely that a compiled language might be 15x faster than a interpreted language doing a compute-bound workload, when said compiled language is oft

You find it unlikely that a compiled language might be 15x faster than a interpreted language doing a compute-bound workload, when said compiled language is often 30x faster in posted synthetic benchmarks... I think you are extremely skeptical... I have ported node.js applications to Go and seen similar substantial speedups. In my cases though I was running in a multi-threading enviroment. not GAE and the performance difference (improvement) was much greater under concurrent load versus single request latency. But that seems reasonable since node.js is closer to Go in performance than Python is. I guess I just believe it because I have seen it. :)