Switching to Go though they were able to get 4MB/s. Even though they claimed to do "line-by-line" translation, I wonder how much of that speed-up was language/libraries vs rearchitecting.

Unless there is some reason to disbelieve the line-by-line claim, can't we assume it's all due to the more performant implementation?

Python is a joy when it's fast enough, but it's not surprising that it isn't good at throughput on small devices.

I didn't mean to imply they were lying in the post, more that it's probably hard to do a line-by-line translation from Python to Go. The nature of having to convert to things like channels in Go might help to re-architect the program even at a micro-level.