A historical performance comparison of Go versions 1.2 through 1.18, measured using the GoAWK interpreter across two benchmark programs: a string-processing word counter and a CPU-bound numeric loop. Results show countwords is ~5x faster and sumloop ~14x faster compared to Go 1.2. Key improvements came from runtime and garbage collector changes in 1.3, standard library optimizations through 1.7, compiler improvements through 1.9, and the switch to register-based function calling in 1.17. The register-calling change notably benefited tree-walking interpreters but had no measurable impact on virtual machine implementations with few function calls.
1 Impression