Comment by CamouflagedKiwi

What? Compared to Python they're like lightning. Typically milliseconds to the start of main() - admittedly they can be slowed down by init() nonsense and terrible generated protobuf code nonsense in deep dependency trees - but with a non-trivial Python program you can look forward to an order of magnitude more. There are techniques to help address that but (1) they're not idiomatic and (2) it still only mitigates it.

I suppose Go programs are slower than the equivalent thing in C or C++, but I'm not sure that's a very relevant comparison in most cases today (how many new things being written would choose those languages).