[yokohummer7]

> The big difference with stuff like GC and re-writing stuff in go slowing the compiler time is that they are not inherent to the language.

Actually, I think GC is inherent to the language, and that's why I listed it as one of the trade-offs that Go made (not the Go implementation made). Almost every language construct depends on GC, e.g. append(), make(), and more. Even the following innocent-looking code:

  func f() *int {
    a := 1
    return &a
  }

is GC-dependent, because it would result in a dangling pointer in non-GC languages. But the code is perfectly fine in Go because GC is inherent to the language. It is not possible to make GC optional in Go, so the performance penalty will stay there forever, only alleviated as the implementation matures (or sometimes regressed, as Go 1.5 shows), unless you use only unsafe.Pointer all the time.