Go versus Java fastest programs

Back in April 2010, Russ Cox charitably suggested that only fannkuch-redux, fasta, k-nucleotide, mandlebrot, nbody, reverse-complement and spectral-norm were close to fair comparisons. As someone who implemented programming languages, his interest was "measuring the quality of the generated code when both compilers are presented with what amounts to the same program."

Differences in approach - to memory management, parallel programming, regex, arbitrary precision arithmetic, implementation technique - don't fit in that kind-of fair comparison — but we still have to deal with them.

These are only the fastest programs. There may be additional measurements for programs which seem more-like a fair comparison to you. Always look at the source code.

regex-redux
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	6.84	340,376	810	9.43	30% 43% 13% 52%
Java	10.31	644,560	740	31.47	72% 72% 92% 70%
pidigits
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	2.10	8,448	603	2.17	1% 48% 55% 0%
Java	3.07	39,320	938	3.31	2% 5% 3% 98%
mandelbrot
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	5.47	31,088	905	21.77	100% 99% 99% 99%
Java	6.83	79,108	796	26.86	97% 99% 99% 99%
fasta
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	2.08	3,560	1358	5.61	80% 37% 76% 78%
Java	2.22	45,172	2473	5.99	61% 50% 98% 60%
spectral-norm
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	3.94	2,740	548	15.74	100% 100% 100% 100%
Java	4.19	36,680	950	16.31	98% 97% 97% 98%
n-body
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	21.25	1,588	1310	21.48	0% 1% 100% 0%
Java	21.95	35,604	1429	22.75	2% 1% 100% 1%
reverse-complement
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	3.83	1,782,940	1338	6.67	21% 74% 16% 62%
Java	3.16	712,368	2183	7.08	65% 47% 42% 70%
fannkuch-redux
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	17.56	1,524	900	70.00	100% 100% 100% 100%
Java	14.33	34,888	1282	56.56	99% 98% 99% 98%
k-nucleotide
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	11.77	160,184	1607	44.52	94% 98% 94% 92%
Java	9.33	447,976	1812	29.36	73% 83% 82% 77%
binary-trees
source	secs	mem	gz	busy	cpu load
Go	25.17	361,152	1005	86.86	87% 89% 86% 84%
Java	8.32	953,620	835	28.37	95% 87% 81% 77%
Go	go version go1.13 linux/amd64
Java	openjdk 13 2019-09-17 OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 13+33) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 13+33, mixed mode, sharing)