I wish the article would show a graph of the golang heap usage. I'm reminded of this cloudflare article [0] from a while back where they created an example that seemed to exhibit similar performance issues when they created many small objects to be garbaged collected. They solved it by using a pooled allocator instead of relying solely on the GC. Wonder if that would have been applicable here to the go version.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/recycling-memory-buffers-in-go/