You should have heard about Go, Google's new language. To be honest, it is one of the ugliest languages I've ever used (I mean among the ones not designed to be ugly); but it's interesting enough, and I decided to teach myself some.
Here's the result of a few hrs of reading, searching, coding, reading again and coding: an (almost) port of Josh's Python URL Link Checker; it doesn't support checking local files, but it has a nice -v switch which lets you see all processed URLs. So far, programming Go felt a bit like programming C++; also Go statically links code at the moment, which results in an executable of size 1.2MB for 64bit Linux. (DISCLAIMER: the following program is a toy, don't use it for anything serious)