I'm not sure if it's because the JVM has a bad rep or people like the familiar feeling of Go (smaller learning curve) or some other reason, but it surprises me so many people jump to Go for performance similar to what you'd get on a modern JVM language (Clojure, Scala), but with less expressiveness, fewer libraries, and (I believe) less tooling.

Of course this only really applies to long running apps (web servers), if startup time matters then certainly Go wins.

Perhaps I need to try Go out, but I just don't see what the selling point is.