[drb311]

From your answer then we could already improve the author's introduction...

"Go is an open source programming language designed for building simple, fast, and reliable software. It's a good choice where squeezing maximum performance out of the hardware is a primary concern."

Maybe a minor point -- but it makes the book far more compelling to people who will benefit from it, while enabling those who won't to move on.

So given that your choices for high performance is:

"C, C++, Nimrod, Rust, D, Go, ..."

Is there really nothing the author could say to help choose between them?