A mere 50% slowdown over C given Go's ergonomics? That's amazing.

Although, you and the parent are talking about different things. He didn't say "Go is 50% slower than C" he said well written Go is up to 50% slower than well written C. I'd expect average Go code to be 100%+ slower than average C code, which is likely what you're talking about.

> That's my point - in the space of ahead-of-time compiled, statically typed languages Go produces code that runs significantly slower than other languages.

That's not the space Go is in. You forgot a huge factor - memory management. Go has a GC and therefore is not anywhere near the same space as C/Rust/C++. Thus, such comparisons are inherently flawed - Go isn't competing on speed with C/Rust/C++, but with Java/C#.

Using C instead of Go is a mistake for all but the most performance critical applications. Use C for small pieces of code that need maximum performance. Use Go everywhere else.

If you're writing a compiler, use Go: it's easily fast enough and very programmer-efficient. If you're writing SIMD convolution code, use C. For example, here is my compiler (written in Go) that generates AVX-512 neural net convolution code in C: https://NN-512.com

For almost all purposes, Go is a better choice than C. Go is almost always fast enough by a wide margin, and the resulting program is easier to write and higher quality.

Having a language that can hold its own weight in the AOT, statically typed world while also having the UX thats comparable to javascript is insane.

Rust, C/C++ is a last resort, your'd only touch it if you absolutely need it.

To have a language with better UX than Java, C#, Python etc. that greatly expands how far you can go without resorting to C/C++ is super kewl!