First paragraph: "In Part 1, we looked at the code of two web services that implement an authentication web service. One written in Java, and one written in Go. It’s time to beat up on them a little bit."

http://boundary.com/blog/2012/09/13/comparing-go-and-java/

And the code repo: https://github.com/collinvandyck/go-and-java

I would like to see Ulterior Reference Counting, or age-based hybrid GC for both.

http://www.powershow.com/view/14655a-MGM5M/Ulterior_Referenc...

Your guess is probably quite accurate, is also probably mostly benchmarking the quality of the PostgreSQL drivers, the Go ones are good, but I'm sure there has been much more work in optimizing the Java ones.

Some notes from looking at the Go code. I don't know how important are those for performance, more like style nits.

Java version doesn't do type conversion: https://github.com/collinvandyck/go-and-java/blob/master/jav...

   rs.getString("id")
   rs.getBoolean("admin")

Go version does conversion at runtime, as row.Scan() accepts interface values.

Also, the usage of sql interface is not optimal (at least with regards to code length) -- since the query is for one row, why not use QueryRow instead of Query?

Authorization header decoding is strange -- it creates new base64 decoder, then string reader, then decodes. Why not just use base64.StdEncoding.DecodeString() and get rid of a few lines of code and a few allocations?

https://github.com/collinvandyck/go-and-java/blob/master/go/...

Similarly, JSON marshals into a newly allocated slice instead of creating a decoder and then marshaling directly into ResponseWriter.

https://github.com/collinvandyck/go-and-java/blob/master/go/...

Constants for HTTP error codes, that are declared in net/http, for some reason are redeclared

https://github.com/collinvandyck/go-and-java/blob/master/go/...

- - -

I sometimes wonder why various benchmarks include colorful charts, but fail to include a few lines from a simple run of profiler. It's so easy to do, and yet nobody bothers to learn where the cycles are actually spent!

Also somebody in the gonuts list noted that both versions are using the database differently, if you fix the Go version to use prepared statements it doubles throughput.