Not to mention it used an ancient version of Go, even Go 1 is dramatically faster than that, and since Go 1 there have been even more dramatic performance improvements, but the main issue is that the guy that wrote the benchmarks really had no idea what he was doing (there were similar criticisms from outside the Go communities about the quality of the benchmark).
Honestly I'm happy to hear that. I'm one of those rare individuals who gets to write go at work. I'm really happy with go performance and memory usage. Like really really happy. The different between the cpu usage of a go program using protocol buffers and a python program using protocol buffers is pretty dramatic (go is the clear winner).
Most folks would assume a paper coming out of google involving go has some go experts involved. Clearly this is not the case.
No, is not worth reading, is misleading at best and has been throughly debunked:
http://blog.golang.org/2011/06/profiling-go-programs.html
Not to mention it used an ancient version of Go, even Go 1 is dramatically faster than that, and since Go 1 there have been even more dramatic performance improvements, but the main issue is that the guy that wrote the benchmarks really had no idea what he was doing (there were similar criticisms from outside the Go communities about the quality of the benchmark).