Choosing between a programming language and a framework is very important in business server-side development. When creating something on the backend, many decisions must be made, especially when comparing Golang to Node.
In both types of projects, the ideal tech stack impacts the assignment’s effectiveness and overall backend development. Choosing the proper programming language at the start is critical for any type of server-side application or microservice.
Two popular options that spring to mind in these situations are Node.js and Go (or Golang). These two products focus on building and expanding libraries, data management, APIs, and less-user-facing programming. JavaScript is used in the backend of Node.js, and many companies are always looking to recruit Node.js engineers.
Meanwhile, Google Go, often known as Golang, has greatly increased its user experience capabilities since being adopted by large corporations such as Uber. In this article, we will examine the benefits, drawbacks, and use cases of both Go and Node js to assist you in choosing the best tool for your company's project.
Come on, let's get started!
Go: What Is It?
Google created the computer language Go, sometimes referred to as Golang, in 2009. With a syntax that is mostly based on C, it is a statically typed language that also has type safety, garbage collection, and dynamic typing capabilities.
With the advent of a new language, a new service appeared, provided by the Golang development company. Go is especially well-suited for creating massive, distributed systems because of its simple, effective, and scalable architecture.
One of Go's key characteristics is its support for concurrency, which makes it simple for programmers to create multitasking applications.
Additionally, Go emphasizes simplicity, which helps developers who come from other languages learn and utilize Go more quickly. Because of its limited standard library, it needs extra libraries for many typical activities, such as establishing a database connection and sending an HTTP request.
Despite its simplicity, Go is a powerful language used in many different applications, such as networked programs, server infrastructure, and command-line tools.
The graph above shows that fewer than 0.1% of web servers running well-known websites utilize Go. W3Techs is the source.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Golang
Here, we'll outline the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing Golang to provide you with a thorough understanding.
Pros
- Performance. Golang operates much more quickly than interpreted languages like Node.js because it is compiled into machine code. Additionally, Golang comes with integrated profiling and tracing tools that make it simple to enhance the efficiency of your applications.
- Parallel processing. Golang's built-in concurrency support makes writing highly concurrent applications that use contemporary multi-core computers simple.
- Minimal syntax. Even for non-programmers who are unfamiliar with the language, Golang's straightforward syntax facilitates learning and use.
- The ability to scale. Golang's memory efficiency and concurrency architecture make it a viable option for developing high-performance, large-scale applications.
- Large standard library. Golang's standard library supports file I/O, encryption, networking, and other features. With Golang's abundance of third-party libraries, creating sophisticated applications fast and easily is possible.
Cons
- Trash pickup. Garbage collection in Golang simplifies memory management, but in some situations, it may also result in performance costs.
- Learning curve. Although Golang's simple syntax makes it easy to learn, certain developers who are unfamiliar with the language may find it difficult to understand the concurrency model and error handling.
- A young ecosystem. Even with its large and expanding community, Golang is still not as developed as some other languages like Python or Java. This may make it more challenging to locate developers with language knowledge or to find answers to specific issues.
- Restricted GUI support. Building desktop apps with intricate user interfaces may be more challenging with Golang due to its limited support for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in comparison to other languages like Python or Java.
Now that you understand Golang well let's examine Node.js.
Node.js: What Is It?
An open-source JavaScript runtime environment called Node.js was created to satisfy the demands of intricate, highly scalable network applications. This environment, which is based on the V8 JavaScript engine seen in Google Chrome, enables you to create programs that may potentially operate on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Because Node.js is built in JavaScript, programmers may more easily run server-side and client-side code in the same language.
Thanks to Node.js, JavaScript has successfully matured over the years to enable full-stack development, which includes both frontend and backend development. Because of this, it's also among the most popular event-driven environments for web application development.
W3Techs reports that more than 3.3 % of web servers powering popular websites utilize Node.js.
Not to mention that Node.js is being utilized by leading businesses to speed up app development, such as Medium, Linkedin, Trello, PayPal, and Netflix.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Node.js
Not everyone should use Node.js. Before choosing, take into account the following benefits and drawbacks.
Pros
- Simple to understand. JavaScript, which is utilized by Node.js, is a popular and simple language to learn. Because of this, it's the perfect option for developers who are already proficient in JavaScript and want to start creating server-side apps.
- Elevated efficiency. Google Chrome and Node.js are both built on top of the V8 JavaScript engine. Because of this, it operates very quickly and can manage high traffic volumes without depleting system resources.
- Non-blocking and event-driven I/O. Because Node.js employs an event-driven, non-blocking I/O paradigm, it can manage several connections at once without causing the main thread to stall. This makes it perfect for creating real-time applications like online games and chat programs.
- Big community. Through forums, blogs, and other online resources, a sizable and vibrant community of developers actively contributes to the development of Node.js and offers assistance.
Cons
- Dependency management NPM. Because Node.js utilizes NPM (Node Package Manager) for dependency management, installing packages may sometimes result in version conflicts or other problems.
- Just one threaded. Node.js processes all incoming requests using a single thread. This may result in performance gains, but handling blocked I/O operations—like file I/O or network requests—may become challenging.
- Support for multiple cores is restricted. Node.js is not designed for multi-core processing, which might restrict its speed on multi-core platforms even if it can execute several processes.
- Callback hell. Due to its heavy reliance on callbacks, Node.js is frequently prone to "callback hell," or very nested, difficult-to-read code.
Which Businesses Make Use of Them?
Before we discuss the details of Golang vs Nodejs for web app development, let's examine the advantages that well-known businesses have with each.
Businesses using Golang
- Google. Google utilizes it as a language creator for content optimization, web indexing, and pretty much all other background functions.
- American Express. For its infrastructure requirements, this multinational banking company uses Go technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. They benefit from Go's effective garbage collection and concurrency, which facilitate transaction processing.
- Dropbox. With over 700 million customers, Dropbox is a cloud file storage business that uses Go to handle the challenges of scale and security in its systems.
Businesses using Node.js
- eBay. One of the biggest online retailers, used Node.js for a number of essential services and apps. Node.js offers a dynamic user experience by managing a large number of real-time interactions.
- PayPal. A well-known payment provider that used JavaScript to integrate the server side and browser has switched to Node.js. It led to faster development with fewer personnel and a 35% reduction in reaction time.
- Netflix. A well-known streaming service chose Node.js to improve back-end and front-end communication. This enhanced user content delivery and loading times.
Go vs. Node.Js: A Comprehensive Comparison
After introducing Node.js and Go, we can see that although they are both contemporary and effective languages for backend web development, their philosophies and advantages vary.
Let Go vs. Node.Js compare them on many important fronts.
Performance
When it comes to comparing the Nodejs vs Golang performance, both languages are designed for building efficient and scalable systems, but they have distinct architectural approaches and strengths.
Node. js, based upon the V8 JavaScript engine, is an async, I/O, single-threaded environment. It performs awesomely in terms of its capabilities to deal with many connections simultaneously, and it best serves more I/O-bound tasks, especially in the development of real-time apps, web servers, and APIs. Nonetheless, all these activities run in a non-threaded manner.
As such, a large number of CPU jobs may slow down the process due to its inefficiency in utilizing multiple processor cores.
On the other hand, Go is a statically typed, compiled language designed with concurrency and parallel processing in mind. It features lightweight threads called "goroutines" and a built-in mechanism for communication and synchronization called "channels." This architecture allows Go programs to take full advantage of modern multi-core processors. It is well-suited for CPU-bound tasks, such as scientific computing, data processing, and network programming.
Additionally, Go's efficient memory management and low-level control over memory allocation contribute to its performance advantages.
Learning Curve
With its own ideas, procedures, regulations, interfaces, and pointers, Go is a comprehensive and relatively young language. Because there aren't as many internet resources for it, developers must do extensive study to have a reasonable understanding of it.
In contrast, JavaScript is the most widely used programming language worldwide. Because of this, even developers with little understanding of JavaScript may easily pick up Node.js. Because JavaScript is so old, there are plenty of physical and online resources for beginners, as well as a sizable JS community that exchanges knowledge and gives support.
Error-handling
This category has no winners. Node.js handles errors via throw-catch, a conventional technique in which errors are "caught" as soon as they happen. Many programmers are aware of this straightforward and widely used error-handling technique, which lowers the amount of code generated and, in certain circumstances, may expedite the development process.
Error handling in Golang has to be clear. Thus, from the outset, the coding methodology should be methodical and disciplined, which enhances maintainability. You write more code when you use Golang, but with time, it becomes simpler to understand.
Community
Any technology generally has a large developer community actively contributing to its development. In addition, it assists both novice and seasoned engineers in resolving challenging development problems.
Considering its youth, the Golang community is vibrant and expanding. On GitHub, it has almost 7,400 contributors, and Google is supporting and improving it.
One of the biggest tech communities is dedicated to Node.js and includes a plethora of forums, online resources, and support channels. It is sponsored by IT behemoths like IBM and Microsoft, and it has over 11,500 GitHub contributors.
Scalability
Since Node.js is single-threaded, as we've already said, each command is executed one at a time. And for huge applications that need sheer bulk and a high number of concurrent processes, this can be its fatal fault. Event callbacks provide some concurrency in JavaScript, even if they're not very useful.
Conversely, Golang is more suitable for scalability due to its coroutines, or "goroutines." Thanks to goroutines, multiple threads may operate concurrently, enabling the timely completion of concurrent jobs.
Speed and Security
The Go library is constructed considering contemporary development standards. In addition to providing the highest levels of concurrency and scalability, it provides developers with a quick and safe environment for app development. It can write clean code and has excellent debugging features.
The main focus of Node.js coding is leveraging several ready-to-use frameworks that streamline the whole product development process. It protects vital company data and expedites all tasks to prevent any kind of detour. Moreover, Nodejs vs Go security will come from safeguarding code against SQL injections and sensitive data.
Tools
Having readily available tools may decrease development time. Through NPM, developers using Node.js may access over 836,000 open-source tools and libraries. While Node.js has no shortage of tools, selecting the best ones may be difficult.
Although Go lacks a large selection of tools, it does have a strong standard library. Although there aren't many tools for Go, what there are is designed to make Go programming simpler. Go Vet identifies potentially dangerous structures, whereas Go Test enables developers to perform a number of tests on the code.
Salary
According to Talent.com, Node.js developers in the United States can expect to make $122,649 in total compensation annually, whereas Go programmers make $150,000 annually.
Those differences may be explained by a few different variables. First, whereas Node.js is an environment utilized by JavaScript engineers, who typically earn just $117,000 a year, Go is a whole programming language.
Second, there is an abundance of programmers available in the JavaScript industry, whereas Golang remains underdeveloped. Although JavaScript is still the most in-demand language, Golang is becoming more and more popular.
Conclusion
The results clearly demonstrate how Node.js vs Golang performance performs differently. Although each platform performs well on its own, Golang outperforms in terms of speed, concurrency, and resource efficiency. Due to its compiled nature, lightweight goroutines, and effective runtime, it is a very good option for high-performance applications that need scalable concurrency and quick reaction times.
Conversely, Node.js provides unmatched developer productivity, a wide range of ecosystem support, and a smooth interface with front-end JavaScript frameworks.
The decision of Go vs Node js ultimately depends on your business project's particular needs and goals, such as optimizing developer productivity, maximizing performance, or using pre-existing JavaScript knowledge.
