[microtonal]

It's a nonsense comparison anyway. E.g. with Java I don't have to care much about the hardware an operating system (e.g. we develop on Mac and deploy on Linux).

And sure, you can use an application container. But you can also embed a webserver. E.g., we Jetty embedded and use a strict SecurityManager policy[1]. So it's more like:

Code -> JVM (with security manager)

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment...

[lateefj]

Not sure I follow? With Go we develop on Mac and deploy on Linux. Just change the environment variable. Linux has some great built in tools for "security management".

[microtonal]

You have to recompile for another platform. There may also be subtle differences in the platforms.

[NateDad]

There are some subtle differences.... but these would likely be exposed in almost any language with or without a VM. For example, when porting some of our Linux Go code to Windows, we realized we were renaming a file while we held the file handle open. That works fine on Linux, and blows up on Windows. That's not really something a VM can manage for you. Similar things like "what's the canonical directory for storing your ssh configuration" is different per OS, and again, is not likely to be something that the VM will sort out for you.

I'm in the middle of porting Juju, a pretty huge Go program, from linux to linux and windows, and almost all the changes necessary are not things that a VM can help with, like "cloud init doesn't exist on windows" and "unix pipes don't exist on windows" etc.

For everything else, the Go runtime really does a pretty good job of abstracting away the differences.