Can Java Microservices Be As Fast As Go? A 2026 Benchmark Update

Six years ago, Peter Nagy and I asked a question that was simple enough to be fun and annoying enough to be useful: can Java microservices be as fast as Go microservices ? It was not meant to be a language war, because those are usually subjective anyway, and worse, they tend to make people less curious. The practical question was smaller: if you take a small HTTP service, implement it carefully in Go and Java, and run it on the same hardware, do the results land in the same performance neighborhood?