>Is compilation speed really an issue given the use cases for Go?
Yes, I find compilation speed to be one of the most important things. But it is not a selling point for go. The go compiler is not very fast, and speed is not an acceptable excuse for a lack of parametric polymorphism. Ocaml has not just parametric polymorphism, but many other basic type system features. And yet ocamlopt is both 5-10 times faster than the go compiler, and still produces faster binaries.
That is what I'm saying (I think we agree). It seems like a focus of Go's simplicity is to improve compilation speed and yet there are languages like Ocaml that do have generics (and a whole lot more) that seem to compile faster.
Yes, I find compilation speed to be one of the most important things. But it is not a selling point for go. The go compiler is not very fast, and speed is not an acceptable excuse for a lack of parametric polymorphism. Ocaml has not just parametric polymorphism, but many other basic type system features. And yet ocamlopt is both 5-10 times faster than the go compiler, and still produces faster binaries.