Nine years ago I was doing a lot of bioinformatics work. I was also writing golang code to learn the language and see if I could use it for my daily programming tasks.
At the same time I came across a set of benchmarks that tested how fast different programming languages could read fastq files. The winner was a heavily optimized c program.
Naturally, I decided to write an implementation in golang. My first attempt did not do better than the c version (didn't do that bad either -- same order of magnitude if I remember correctly). But with the help of the golang community I ended up writing a version that was faster than the c implementation.
Fast forward 9 years. I came across this article that discusses how the different versions of golang have been cons