Question

As we could see from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game in 2010:

• Go is on average 10x slower than C
• Go is 3x slower than Java !?

How can this be, bearing in mind that Go compiler produces native code for execution?
Immature compilers for Go? Or there is some intrinsic problem with the Go language?

EDIT:
Most answers deny intrinsic slowness of Go languge, claiming the problem resides in immature compilers.
Therefore I’ve made some own tests to calculate Fibonacci numbers: Iterative algorithm runs in Go (freebsd,6g) with the same speed as in C (with O3 option). The dull recursive one runs in Go 2 times slower than in C (with -O3 option; with -O0 – the same). But I haven’t seen 10x fall as in the Benchmarks Game.

Answer 1

The 6g and 8g compilers are not particularly optimising, so the code they produce isn’t particularly fast.

They’re designed to run fast themselves and produce code that’s OK (there is a bit of optimisation). gccgo uses GCC’s existing optimisation passes, and might provide a more pointful comparison with C, but gccgo isn’t feature-complete yet.

Benchmark figures are almost entirely about quality of implementation. They don’t have a huge amount to do with the language as such, except to the extent that the implementation spends runtime supporting language features that the benchmark doesn’t really need. In most compiled languages a sufficiently clever compiler could in theory strip out what isn’t needed, but there comes a point where you’re rigging the demo, since very few real users of the language would write programs that didn’t use that feature. Moving things out of the way without removing them entirely (e.g. predicting virtual call destinations in JIT-compiled Java) starts to get tricky.

FWIW, my own very trivial test with Go when I was taking a look at it (a loop of integer addition, basically), gccgo produced code towards the fast end of the range between gcc -O0 and gcc -O2 for equivalent C. Go isn’t inherently slow, but the compilers don’t do everything, yet. Hardly surprising for a language that’s 10 minutes old.