I don't think so. People love to see how far they can go in some aspect sometimes. If I had the same amount of free time 5 years ago, I'd have tried the same thing with Go, because I like the language, and love the act of programming and seeing things.

Also, I also agree that people optimize without proper testing and profiling. If there's a real bottleneck here, trying to optimize it is the right call. OTOH, optimizing without profiling opens a lot of unnecessary cans.

Lastly, Go doesn't like constant allocation and deallocation of variables, that's true, but I believe knowing this and optimizing hot-loops for that goes a very long way as a start.