Restricting this kind of discussion to income tax is misleading to the point of being deceptive. Most people pay more in payroll taxes than they pay in income taxes. That 47% of households who paid no income tax paid plenty in payroll taxes.

The only way you can conclude that nearly 50% of the people in the U.S. pay not taxes is if you think that the only taxes people pay are income taxes. In fact most people pay payroll taxes, for social security and medicare. Those are about 7.5% of income for most people. 7.5% is a long way from zero.

And then there are sales taxes.

Go has panic/recover, which can serve the same purpose as exceptions in other language.

Go has no immutability concept, so it doesn't have half-assed one.

Yes, focusing on compile time is relevant; I think anybody who writes large C++ programs can see the point of that.

Go has a modularization system by my definition, I don't know what you mean by it.

gcc's inlining got much better in the 3.4 release, and got better still in the 4.0 release. If you still see a penalty for inlining in the 4.0 release, please file a bug report as described at http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs.html. Thanks.

As far as joining the project goes, it is easy. Sign up for the mailing lists, check out the code, and start working. Contributing a substantial patch requires signing a copyright assignment before it can be accepted.